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

C’mon Aussie!

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.