Photo sharing website Flickr has long been a favorite social media space for museums, it is cheap, easy to use and has a large and active community of users. Museums have been very inventive in the way in which they use the site, stepping beyond simply using it to share pictures, here are five ways that I’ve seen museums using Flickr in 2009:
Opening up the archives
The Brooklyn Museum is one of many institutions around the world who have started to share their photographic archive through Flickr. The public are free to download and use these out of copyright images, but this isn’t simply used as a photo sharing tool, the Brooklyn Museum also asks those looking at the images to help them find out more information about the pictures, for example ‘do you know where this is?’.
If your interested in sharing your archives on Flickr, you might want to read about The Commons on Flickr.
Contributing to exhibitions
Tate have used Flickr to alongside a number of exhibitions, for example earlier this year they ran a competition to find 36 pictures which were used to create a poster to coincide with their exhibition Colour Chart.
The gallery has previously done similar things with How We Are Now and Street & Studio.
Crowd-sourcing advertising
“It’s Time We Met” was a marketing campaign for the Metropolitan Museum of Art which ran earlier this year. To find authentic images of the museum from the visitors point of view for the campaign they used Flickr.
I think that the images are all the more striking, because you know that they are real experiences, shared by real people.
Crowd- sourced curating on Flickr
The Luce Foundation used Flickr to invite the public to help them to select the right item to fill gaps in their glass display cases left when pieces are away on loan in a project called Fill the Gap.
Flickr provided a low cost way to get people involved in this project, giving them a space to debate what should fill the gap.
To engage audiences with games
The London Transport Museum used Flickr in a very creative way to create a scavenger hunt game in July 2008. Participants were broken in to groups, who were given a series of clues which were answered by uploading a picture to Flickr.
As well as one team winning on the day, the public also voted for the best picture of the day in a public vote on Flickr.
Are you using Flickr in a creative way? I’d love to hear about it.
Here are two examples I can offer which solved different problems:
Derby Museums & Art Gallery is one of three partners in the “Derby Cathedral Peregrine Project” in England. http://derby.gov.uk/peregrines. They installed three web cameras on a peregrine falcon’s nest ledge in 2007, and were amazed by its popularity (1.3 million hits so far). Frustration expressed by viewers wanting to capture and share special moments in these birds’ lives led to the Museum creating a Flickr Group Pool in 2009 (http://www.flickr.com/groups/derbyperegrines) It has added considerably to the user-engagement and interest already provided by their blog with its embedded YouTube video clips of mating egg-laying and fledging captured by the project team.
A second, more traditional use of Flickr has allowed local expert botanists and photographers to take and post images of Derbyshire plants to another Flickr Group pool at http://www.flickr.com/groups/derbyshirefloraThese are available for embedding by the Group administrator into standard html pages on the Museums’ “Flora of Derbyshire” website. Eg http://bit.ly/5BU5Ba and for eventual inclusion in a related book.
The project is still under development at http://www.derby.gov.uk/flora.
Sorry. Two faulty links slipped into my comments above. (Too much Christmas cheer, I fear). These should have been:
http://www.derby.gov.uk/peregrines
http://www.flickr.com/groups/derbyshireflora
Hi Nick
Thanks for the links some of the great stuff that your doing in Derby, Really interesting.
Thanks for sharing!
Jim
Jim,
Nice post with a lot of great projects. At the San Jose Museum of Art we are currently in the midst of a Flickr related project. Focussing on our Ansel Adams exhibition we are soliciting our visitors and the world at large to submit their own Adams inspired photographs. We utilized a video that was created in-house and posted on YouTube to solicit the photos. In the exhibition we have set up a kiosk where visitors can browse through the submissions.
You can find out more at:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/ansel/
http://www.chris-alexander.com/2009/08/two-recent-projects/
Flickr is a great tool and should be used more by museums!
Chris Alexander