Top 10 Reasons The Commons on Flickr is Awesome

I promised a follow-up after we’d been in The Commons for a while, so here you go.

Top 10 Reasons The Commons on Flickr is Awesome:

10.

George Oates is cool and George runs The Commons.

9.

Come together now: Cross-collection searching. Museums have been having trouble with this for too many years. It took Flickr 6 months. George, we want a widget!

8.

Flickr is a global community and that means…say it with me now: multi-language tagging

7.

Flickrites are creative. We asked “tell us how you are using these images” and look at one of the responses we got. Note the tag that indicates this is a mash-up of material from our lantern slide collection and the boxer from Library of Congress for the 34th Weekly Contest on Man Ray. Super fun. Thanks, The hills are alive!

6.

Flickr peeps are correcting our captions…that’s LIéna not Jena. In turn, we are updating records on Flickr and at home.

5.

…are eagle-eye at catching inconsistencies

4.

…are showing us current images to our lantern slides

3.

…helping identify unidentified views

2.

Institutions. The Commons now has 6 participants: Library of Congress, Powerhouse Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Bibliothèque de Toulouse, George Eastman House and yours truly. There will be more on the way soon, but for now take a look if you have not already.

1.

People. We just uploaded our latest set of Egyptian Lantern Slides. This time, in honor of all the Flickr peeps who make The Commons awesome, we uploaded a set of images that have a people focus.

Views, Objects: Egypt. General Views\People [selected images]. View 080: Partly submerged palms above Nile dam, Upper Egypt., 1908, Copyright, 1908, by Stereo-Travel Co. Brooklyn Museum Archives (S10|08 General Views_People, image 9823).