Case Studies/National Library of Australia 'Click and Flick'
The Flickr project is helping PictureAustralia to capture both past and present reflections of Australia and its people. – Fiona Hooton, National Library of Australia —
Images
Overview
Click and Flick is a National Library of Australia (NLA) initiative to open their online pictorial gateway, PictureAustralia, to contributions from the Australian public. Launched in January 2006 in collaboration with Yahoo7!’s Flickr photo-sharing site, Click and Flick enables individuals to contribute their own images to two dedicated Flickr image pools: ‘PictureAustralia: Ourtown’ and ‘PictureAustralia: People, Places and Events’.
‘At PictureAustralia, we’ve approached the challenges of the digital age with a big vision – believing it should be possible to search a comprehensive pictorial record of Australian history and endeavour from one place. More than that, though, the vision is to invite all Australians to place their own image collections there too, so we all play a part in telling the full story.’ – Fiona Hooton, National Library of Australia
PictureAustralia was launched in 2000, and aims to be the definitive pictorial website for and about Australians and Australia, providing one simple search for many collections. It began with a few thousand images from just seven organisations, and has since grown to include over 1.1 million images from the collections of 45 organisations and now individuals via Flickr. It is a portal service, which allows anyone to search these image collections; clicking on a thumbnail of an image will take them to the host organisation's collection, where they can see the image in full and order or request copies. Participating organisations include a range of local, state and federal government organisations and both large and small institutions from across the Australian cultural sector (i.e. galleries, museums, and libraries).
‘Using one simple search facility, PictureAustralia provides access to many collections that offer an insight into the artistic, social, cultural, historical, environmental and political life of Australia.’ – Fiona Hooton, National Library of Australia
The Click and Flick project arose from a survey which found that people wanted more contemporary images to be available on the PictureAustralia service. Flickr was suggested as an easy way to let the public upload and provide metadata for their images, which the library could then harvest. This approach also ties in well with the NLA's Strategic Directions, which includes the objectives to ‘ensure that Australians have access to vibrant and relevant information services’ and to ‘ensure our relevance in a rapidly changing world, participate in new online communities and enhance our visibility.’ While the NLA does mediate the collection, to guarantee the appropriateness of the photographs, they rarely need to censor the material.
