One year ago today, the Australian War Memorial joined the Commons on Flickr. We put up a set of 30 photos of soldiers, sailors, nurses, airmen, wives, mothers, sisters, sweethearts, a prime minister, and a koala. The photos are part of our photo collection of well over a million images which covers the experience of Australians at war and Australian military history from the 1860s to the present. We have uploaded other sets on the Commons since then, each with its own theme: Christmas, children, animals, ANZAC Day, and First World War aviation.
The 103 images have been viewed almost 180,000 times; there have been over 530 comments, 2,000 favorites, 340 tags and 830 contacts. 23 images have been used in 37 galleries. 94 photos have been favorited, 87 have been commented on; almost all have had tags added. There have also been notes added to many images.
Today we have uploaded a new set to the Commons, on the theme of love and war. The earliest images are from the First World War, and the most recent is dated 2003: sadly, there seems to be no end to war. There are photos of weddings, war brides learning about their new countries, and welcome home kisses. One photo shows the wedding of Norma and Frank Bissaker: her wedding dress is one of four from the Memorial’s collection being considered for inclusion in our exhibition Of love and war. Sister H. Woodhead and Lieutenant M. Timbs got married in the Northern Territory in 1943: there is a photo taken after the wedding in the set, and there is also film footage of it from our collection posted on our YouTube channel.
Related information
We joined the Commons of Flickr on 11 November 2008 and posted about it in this blog.
Fabric preservation and the application of fake sweat - one of our curators explains why 60 year old sweat on a wedding dress can be a problem in this video on our YouTube channel.
November 11th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
Thanks for this post Liz – wondering if you have any tips for museums when embarking on Flickr-based projects? We’re about to set some sites up for two exhibitions here and would love to learn from your experiences.
November 11th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
It has been great to see these photographs on Flickr over the past year. The resolution of the photographs there makes it easier to study the detail than the images available directly on the
AWM website here.
One of Australia’s most historically significant photograph collections being brought to a wider audience is a good thing. I figure more Australians have an image of a relative in the AWM collection than in any other single collection in Australia.
Thank you to all at the AWM involved in this.
November 12th, 2009 at 2:44 am
Congratulations, Liz! Those Love & War photos are wonderful.
C’mon Aussie!
December 2nd, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Hi Lynda
Thanks for your question. I am not sure I have tips, but I can tell you what we have done with Flickr.
We have four groups on Flickr. Three are for the public: one for images of the building and grounds, one images from the battlefield tours we offer, and one for people to add their own images – and stories – of Australians in love and war. You can see that group at http://www.flickr.com/groups/1000551@N21/ , and it is related to the Of Love and War exhibition which opens here on 3 December. We also upload our own images of events here at the Memorial, including ANZAC Day and Remembrance Day. Sometimes we embed slideshows from our group on our website, which has been useful for adding progress photos for the new building we are constructing at the moment.
On the Commons on Flickr, we add images from the collection to increase access to them and to see if we can get more information about the people, places or events that they depict. We have had our collection images online now for many years, but, as the Library of Congress and other organisations found, the traffic on Flickr far outstrips what happens on our site. We have linked a number of the uploads to the Commons on Flickr to exhibitions or events here at the Memorial, for instance, a set of images about animals in war while the A is for Animals exhibition was on here, a set of images taken at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 for a joint upload (with National Library of New Zealand, State Library of Queensland and State Library of New South Wales) on ANZAC Day 2009, and the most recent set, which is related to the Of Love and War exhibition. The interesting thing about Flickr is of course how the interface works: it lets people tag, comment, note, favourite, subscribe, search, share and link with great ease. This allows a much richer way for people to interact with the images (and with each other) than what we currently offer on our site. The relatively new Gallery feature on Flickr has also proved to be very interesting, as we see people curating their own collections of images: it is always intriguing to see what people react to in images. Perhaps the best thing about the Commons is that it really is a common: you can see the images from all the participating organisations in one place, and can see not only the differences in the collections, but the similarities.
Let me know if this is or is not the sort of thing you were after.
Liz