Flickr Commons - our third anniversary

On Australia Day 2013 SLQ celebrated its third anniversary as a contributor to The Commons on Flickr. The Commons was launched on January 16 2008, when Flickr released a pilot project in partnership with The Library of Congress.  The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly showcase the treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to demonstrate how community input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer. SLQ was one of the first Australian organisations to participate and we have been thrilled to be part of such vibrant online community.

You have deepened our understanding of our collections by commenting on our photos and telling us why you love them, helped to solve mysteries by adding additional information about the people and places in the photographs, and used them in creative ways. We have just over 2000 of our digitised photographs on The Commons and these images have had more than 2 million views since January 2010.

You can see all of our photos on our photostream or browse over 50 themed sets on topics as diverse as Bathing beauties, World War 1, and School days.

Here's two favourites from our collection on The Commons:

This photo from the early 1950s was recently used by the the Flickr developer's blog to illustrate a story about pushing notifications to Flickr users about what is happening on Flickr in real time. We don't know much about this photograph, but we are hoping that there is a software developer who is also a motorcycle enthusiast who might be able to shed more light about this image.

This photo is the most popular image from our collection in The Commons. It's been viewed 19 000 times  by people from all over the world, fascinated at the idea of four young lads using goats as transport.

In 2013, staff from Description Services will be adding a picture of the Week set to our Flickr Commons collection. Quirky, topical, or just beautiful photography will be showcased. Why not subscribe to receive notification each week when the photo of the week is added to the Photo of the Week 2013 set.

Want to see more digitised photos, maps, music scores and manuscripts? There's more than 60 000 digitised items in our collections. You can find them in One Search, our catalogue.