Congrats on your launch – I was looking through over our Thanksgiving holiday – very cool stuff!! One of the things we’ve noticed is the way the Powerhouse is uploading – same idea, keeping it kind of local (for now) and it seems to really grow community in a good way. As we move forward, I think our own challenge will be to possibly keep it local in a couple of ways – either by uploading the Brooklyn images (slightly problematic because they are not digitized yet, so it’s a project) and possibly integrating better with exhibitions or other things going on in our physical building. At least, I think we may try that and see what (if anything) changes.

The problem we’ve had with the contacts is Flickr has a 3000 contact limit that they seem intent on keeping even for Commons accounts. This has presented a really big problem for us…basically, it’s impossible for us to really get to know these new users because we can’t subscribe to their feeds. As an added issue, we’ve got kind of a icky thing going on – suddenly we’ve friended a bunch of contacts pre-commons and have now had to limit it. Not sure that sends a good message at all to the Flickr community (that we’ve friended some and not others for some reason that they have no clue about and we can’t explain) and there’s nothing we can do about it – a rule is a rule, I guess, but it really has cramped our style a bit!

Thanks for writing (and reading) – it’s going to be great to see how all this progresses.

The National Library of NZ went live on The Commons last Thursday.

We also have a ‘Normal’ account on Flickr that we’ve been running since mid 2007.

Both accounts contain similar material – historical photos from our collections. The main difference is (and will go on being) the licensing; All Rights Reserved (although we give permission to reproduce the images on websites under certain conditions in each image description) and No Known Copyright Restrictions (where we’re encouraging much freer use).

I’m a bit concerned too that we might confuse people, although interestingly I’m already seeing existing contacts join our Commons stream, and new Commons contacts also joining up to our ‘Normal’ stream.

We went live with 120 images, and I tried to get a good geographical spread of New Zealand for (what I assumed would be) the international audience for The Commons. Also, we’re based in Wellington, NZ’s capital city, and this has had some effect on the digitisation of our photo collections (local people wanting local images digitised – e.g. for renovating old houses). Therefore there are heaps of Wellington photos available on our main online image database (another reason to try not to be too Wellington-focused when picking images for The Commons).

But one of the other interesting things I’m seeing is that Wellington has a really active web community – and they’re blogging about The Commons and asking for more Wellington images. So I guess the lesson I’m taking from it is – you can never entirely predict who your audience will be, and it’s awesome that they will tell you (in different kinds of ways) what they’d like to see more of.

Anyway – that’s my piece, based on the 116 hours we’ve been on The Commons! Am really looking forward to seeing what you have to say about workload – I’m grateful that Flickr has just rolled out a tweak to the way you can add contacts, for example, which is speeding up my work in a small but very meaningful way.

Courtney