The Flickr Foundation

A non-profit foundation dedicated to long-term digital preservation.

Imagine if we could place ourselves 100 years into the future and still have access to the billions of photos shared by millions of people on Flickr, one of the best documented, broadest photographic archives on the planet.

The Flickr Foundation represents our commitment to stewarding this digital, cultural treasure to ensure its existence for future generations.

Its first act is the renewal of the Flickr Commons.

The Flickr Foundation

Tagged with

Related links

ZX Spectrum Screenshotter Example - an album on Flickr

Over 700 screenshots of ZX Spectrum games, captured by Jason Scott. Some of these bring back memories.

Tagged with

Archives & Museum Informatics: Museums and the Web 2010: Papers: Cope, A.S., Buckets and Vessels

Here’s one to add to Instapaper or Readability to savour at your leisure: Aaron Straup Cope’s talk at Museums and the Web 2010:

This paper examines the act of association, the art of framing and the participatory nature of robots in creating artifacts and story-telling in projects like Flickr Galleries, the API-based Suggestify project (which provides the ability to suggest locations for other people’s photos) and the increasing number of bespoke (and often paper-based) curatorial productions.

Tagged with

Flickr: National Maritime Museum's Photostream

Flickr Commons just keeps growing and growing. Now there are wonderful collections of pictures from Greenwich available for us all to peruse and tag.

Tagged with

Urban Dirty: Free texture stock photography for your artwork, desktop and design

A nice collection of royalty free texture photos using the Flickr API.

Tagged with

[this is aaronland] a tale of gummy snakes (and spunk)

About halfway through this talk transcript, Aaron starts dropping a barrage of truth bombs:

I understand the web, whose distinguishing characteristic is asynchronous recall on a global scale, as the technology which makes revisiting possible in a way that has genuinely never existed before the web.

What the web has made possible are the economics of keeping something, something which has not enjoyed “hockey stick growth”, around long enough for people to warm up to it. Or to survive long past the moment when people may have grown tired of it.

If your goal is to build something which is designed to flip inside of ten years, like many things in the private sector, that may not seem like a very compelling argument.

If, however, your goal is to build something to match the longevity of the cultural heritage sector, to meet the goal of fostering revisiting, or for novel ideas to outlast the reluctance of the present and to do so at a global scale, or really any scale larger than shouting distance, then I will challenge you to find a better vehicle for doing so than the internet, and the web in particular.

Tagged with

Related posts

The tragedy of the commons

Digital destruction courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.