Comments on: Social Change

By: Lesa Griffith

Lesa Griffith — Fri, 23 May 2014 18:46:25 +0000

Dear Shelley,

Thanks for so generously sharing your digital/social media strategy in this post. I was wondering what your shift in audience goals is. Are you focusing more on reaching a local audience? How do you find that visitor/tourist balance when strategizing your digital media?

Thanks!

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 19 May 2014 21:48:13 +0000

In reply to Christopher.

Christopher,

It appears that Shelley has a very particular goal for her various web presences: “Engagement.” It’s one that I — like you, I imagine — don’t believe should be the beginning and end of an online content strategy.

For me, the purpose of any undertaking online isn’t engagement; it’s access. I wouldn’t think for a moment of removing images from Flickr Commons once they’ve been put there, because that would remove one of the precious few methods that people have to access our materials.

Engagement is for technophile archivists and curators; access is for the patron or user.

It doesn’t help that I find Wikimedia Commons to be a UI disaster, and thoroughly despise trying to find anything there (particularly when that something winds up being a pixelated 100K image that wouldn’t fill a postage stamp). Flickr Commons is imperfect, but from the point of view of someone who searches for images, it’s head and shoulders above Wikimedia Commons.

By: Margaret Warren

Margaret Warren — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 23:19:31 +0000

Interesting post around the all too often neglected area of strategic decision making around online engagement. What’s interesting to me is that it’s very much got to be the right decision making for your organisation, and your goals – as you have outlined in this post. Here at the State LIbrary of Queensland we have seen engagement with our collection on Flickr Common increasing, with lots of comments and tags and engagement from our community in discoverying more and adding new knowledge to our content. It also meets our need to provide a curated view of our photographic content that we don’t have happening so well in our catalogue. We donated 50 000 images to Wikimedia Commons in 2010 and have seen lots of use of it in many articles, as you have also found. The “set and forget” environment of Wikimedia Commons (as far as putting content in an easy place for others to use and re-use) has ensured a very good return on our investment of resources in this space. We are engaging with Historypin as an environment to foster deeply local engagement with our collection around place, but it is still a developing platform for us. It’s great to have others discussing this sticky issue – the big one for us is how to measure depth of engagement in a meaningful way. Something that delineates the tick and flick so often seen on Facebook, and significant research by an individual around an image on Flickr Commons or Histroypin. Would love to know how others are doing this. Cheers
Margaret

By: Amy Sample Ward

Amy Sample Ward — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 04:04:29 +0000

Thank you for sharing this transparent update, for walking the talk of being strategic and community-centered, and for inviting us in (even virtually) as you do so well. I’m excited to watch the tech blog really take shape and NTEN will be along for the ride across channels supporting you!

By: Shelley Bernstein

Shelley Bernstein — Tue, 08 Apr 2014 20:03:32 +0000

In reply to Matthew Murray.

Yes, we decided against it b/c it is not available to individual images. The “home” page, to me, is similar to a bio page – we can’t assume people will look there and, in fact, should assume they won’t. In a change like this, the clarity is key.

By: Shelley Bernstein

Shelley Bernstein — Tue, 08 Apr 2014 20:01:02 +0000

In reply to Matthew Murray. Ah, ha! Yes, thank you, Matthew :) Doing that now...

By: Shelley Bernstein

Shelley Bernstein — Tue, 08 Apr 2014 20:00:09 +0000

In reply to Emily.

We’ve enabled RSS – if you click the link in the top nav, you’ll get the RSS feed which can be plugged into any reader. Also, I’ll likely tweet via @shell7 new posts that go up.

By: Emily

Emily — Tue, 08 Apr 2014 19:16:23 +0000

This is really interesting, and something I assume people will be talking a lot about in the year(s) to come. Can you clarify – for those of us interested in the long(er) form tech-focused blog posts but not the more frequent Tumblr posts, how can we subscribe to the blog only?

By: Matthew Murray

Matthew Murray — Tue, 08 Apr 2014 18:47:29 +0000

In reply to Shelley Bernstein.

Also, you might want to take this page down from your website ; )
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/flickr_commons.php