The Swedish National Heritage Board is celebrating 5 rewarding years on The Commons on Flickr, where we show and share old copyright free images since March 17th, 2009. Until today, 1.325 images have been uploaded to our photostream, arranged in 24 picture sets and five picture collections reflecting our large public collections of photos and other kinds of images. Since 2009, the initial Flickr Commons project has turned into regular activities at the Board, owing to its success.
Our images on The Commons have been viewed more than 6.5 million times so far. Many of them have reached those who might be most interested, as Carl Curman’s photographs from Spain in 1878, which have been much appreciated by our Spanish followers (and by many others too). The images from Spain were also the subject of an article in the Spanish web journal El PaÃs in 2010.
People from more than 70 countries have viewed the images. About 4.500 Flickr community members are our special contacts on Flickr, always updated on our recently uploaded images – as we are updated on theirs!
10 % of the images have had new information added in comments and tags by Flickr members, helping us improve the images’ data in our photo database online – Kulturmiljöbild. Entire images, buildings, places, streets and other objects have been located and identified by committed users (and sometimes via blogs, web media or Twitter). Many viewers have found more images in our photo database through a persistent link at each image on The Commons to the image in the database.
Blogs, social media, web media as well as traditional media have used and written about the images and about the Swedish National Heritage Board’s use of Flickr Commons. An example is an article in the British web journal The Guardian in 2013.
We want to thank all you viewers and followers of our photostream and all you Flickr members who have contributed useful and interesting new information. Thank you for viewing, appreciating, tagging, commenting, discussing, adding knowledge and comparative recent photos in comments and much, much more. Thank you for sharing and using our images in so many different and creative ways!
We are indeed grateful to Flickr and to the Library of Congress for the initiative to create The Commons in 2008, giving cultural heritage institutions as ours this great opportunity. Our experience as a government agency is that a photo sharing web site like Flickr is a splendid way to reach out with your public collections, allowing them to be of both use and enjoyment in society.
