Thursday, August 10, 2006

Lorcan Dempsey on PictureAustralia and Flickr

Lorcan Dempsey has a post that mentions PictureAustralia, Google and Flickr and how the combination are exposing content to more users. Rather than duplicate his entire post, go here to read it. Quite interesting!

The idea of enhancing a digital collection with modern content from users is a very cool. I like how PictureAustralia has done it. As I mentioned recently, the Brooklyn Museum is also using Flickr to enhance one of its exhibits.

BTW with PictureAustralia, the people who take the pictures loaded into Flickr keep their copyright if they want. With the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum wants to assume the copyright on the images. Whatever the institution does, it need to be clearly communicated (which it is not in PictureAustralia). Also, then, the institutions need to instruct users about what they can or cannot do with the images that are donated. It can be easier not to say anything, but users need to be informed so they will hopefully do the correct thing.

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