Hi Travis: I've used Flickr successfully at several institutions now, and, in addition to using it as a method for collections access, have managed to set it up kind of like a low-cost, quick-n-dirty DAM.
Two ways you can do this are to either have one login for the institution that all the staff shares or (my preference) have each user create an account. The main institutional login adds each person as a contact and marks them as a friend or family member. These statuses can be used to set access restrictions on the images. If the permissions are set correctly, the individuals would be able to download a full-size image by clicking on the "All sizes" button within Flickr. Additionally, they would be able to add metadata on their own. An advantage of using Flickr is that should you decide to make the images public, it's easy enough to automatically do so. Another advantage of Flickr is the ability to organize the assets by Collections and Sets, which makes the assets very easy to find. There are some open source DAMS out there, and I've successfully played around with Razuna. I've not had an opportunity to work with other systems, and none of them extensively, so I can't give any opinions on easy DAM solutions, but they might be worth checking out, too. I'm pasting below my recent comments to the Registrar's Listserv that outlines my pros and cons of using Flickr for public collections access (should you decide to go that route). One clarification about the metadata issue (in my "Cons" below): I know that there are some efforts to make tools available to link the collection metadata to the Flickr image, but I don't believe I'm at liberty to discuss the specifics as of yet. Hopefully there will be a solution to that problem soon :) Hope this helps! ~Perian **** As one of the early adopters of using Flickr for increasing access to collections, I think I should speak up here with my list of pros and cons. I presented on this very topic at the CAM conference in March, and I'm hoping to talk about it again at AAM in May. My slides are here: http://www.slideshare.net/psully/interested-public-is-interested-using-flickr-to-put-collection-assets-online And when I was at the Magnes, my boss put up a detailed blog post about the project here: http://blog.magnes.org/opensourceblog/?p=907 Pros: ~Flickr is cheap. Only $25/year for more-or-less unlimited storage ~Flickr is indexed by search engines regularly, so content posted to Flickr is more likely to find found via Google or Yahoo (I have a bit more about this here: http://musematic.net/2010/05/12/cultural-collections-and-the-semantic-web/ ) ~Easy to use, with lots of ways to upload and organize the content ~Opportunities for interaction by the public, including comments, tagging, and identification ~Easy-to-use analytics to see what people are interested in ~Increased rights and reproduction requests Cons: ~Increased rights and reproduction requests. Honestly, we really didn't expect the massive increase in requests. We'd put our content onto Flickr with large enough quality for researchers and teachers and non-profits to use as they needed, and applied a Creative Commons license to the assets as well. But because people could find our assets easily, and were respectful of the bounds of the license, we got pretty swamped with R&R requests. Lots more revenue, but we finally had to cut off all requests during the collections move. ~Potential for "unintended use". Granted, Magnes hadn't seen any of that, despite the ethnically-specific content. There haven't been negative comments to moderate, either. But there's always that potential. ~Applying metadata. This is the biggest problem. The last two weeks Iwas at Magnes, I uploaded on the order of 5000 images. I managed to tag them using Adobe Bridge, but I did not have the opportunity to describe them, because the only way I could do it was by manually copying and pasting from the database, into the image's IPTC fields. So the Magnes Flickr account has a whole lot of beautifully-described assets (see http://www.flickr.com/photos/magnesmuseum/4402841084/ ) and a whole lot of barely-described assets (like http://www.flickr.com/photos/magnesmuseum/4714606931/in/set-72157624310866700/). If I could have, I would have started way earlier on the project and gotten a dedicated volunteer to help. (PS - see amended comment above) ~Artist rights. For Magnes, this wasn't that much of an issue, but for those few pieces that did have limitations on web publication of images, I either didn't publish them at all, or, in the case of those with fuzzy rights (eg. the deed says that Magnes has full rights, but the artist is still living, and copyright perceptions have changed recently) I reduced the size of the image from the standard 1000 pixel length and 72 dpi down to 500 pixel length - large enough for use by teachers, too small for use by publishers. I strongly encourage you to read the Library of Congress' report, "For the Common Good: The Library of Congress Pilot Flickr Project" http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_report_final.pdf It's a really accessible and interesting read. Perian Sully http://www.emphatic.org http://www.musematic.net http://www.mediaandtechnology.org Twitter: @p_sully On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 10:07 AM, Travis Fullerton < Tfullerton at vmfa.state.va.us> wrote: > Sorry for the cross-posting (but, we should all be used to it by now...) > > Hi all. > > I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with using online photo > sharing websites such Shutterfly, Picasa, Flickr, Photobucket, or the like > to share and distribute publicity and event images internally. We don?t > have > a DAMs set up that can be accessed by multiple users (yet) and we are > looking for a simple and cheap solution for allowing image users to browse > publicity images that are ?fresh? and available. We would have about a > dozen > people that would need private access. People like publications, marketing, > education, and web would be the primary users. > > Any comments, advise, or anecdotes are welcome... > > -Travis > > > -- > Travis Fullerton > Assistant Photographer, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts > 200 N Boulevard, Richmond, VA 23220 > 804.340.1538 >
