Glass Houses
You
may have noticed Brooklyn Museumās recent
announcement
that they have pulled out of
Flickr Commons.
Apparently theyāve seen a āsteady decline in engagement levelā on
Flickr, and decided to remove their content from that platform, so they
can focus on their own website as well as Wikimedia Commons.
Brooklyn Museum announced three years ago that they would be cross-posting their content to Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons. Perhaps Iām not seeing their current bot, but they appear to have two, neither of which have done an upload since March of 2011, based on their user activity. Itās kind of ironic that content like this was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Flickr Uploader Bot and not by one of their own bots.
The announcement stirred up a fair bit of discussion about how an institution devoted to the preservation and curation of cultural heritage material could delete all the curation that has happened at Flickr. The theory being that all the comments, tagging and annotation that has happened on Flickr has not been migrated to Wikimedia Commons. Iām not even sure if thereās a place where this structured data could live at Wikimedia Commons. Perhaps some sort of template could be created, or it could live in Wikidata?
Fortunately, Aaron Straup-Cope has a backup copy of Flickr Commons metadata, which includes a snapshot of the Brooklyn Museumās content. Heās been harvesting this metadata out of concern for Flickrās future, but surprise, surprise ā it was an organization devoted to preservation of cultural heritage material that removed it. It would be interesting to see how many comments there were. Iām currently unpacking a tarball of Aaronās metadata on an ec2 instance just to see if itās easy to summarize.
But:
Iām pretty sure Iām living in one of those.
I agree with Ben:
(edsu?)
(textfiles?)
(dantobias?)
(waxpancake?)
(brooklynmuseum?)
Yep. Unfortunately this is a blind spot even for orgs doing things
relatively well
ā Ben Fino-Radin ((benfinoradin?))
It would help if we had a bit more method to the madness of our own Web presence. Too often the Web is treated as a marketing platform instead of our cultureās predominant content delivery mechanism. Brooklyn Museum deserves a lot of credit for talking about this issue openly. Most organizations just sweep it under the carpet and hope nobody notices.
What do you think? Is it acceptable that Brooklyn Museum discarded the user contributions that happened on Flickr, and that all the people who happened to be pointing at said content from elsewhere now have broken links? Could Brooklyn Museum instead decided to leave the content there, with a banner of some kind indicating that it is no longer actively maintained? Donāt lots of copies keep stuff safe?
Or perhaps having too many copies detracts from the perceived value of the currently endorsed places of finding the content? Curators have too many places to look, which arenāt synchronized, which add confusion and duplication. Maybe itās better to have one place where people can focus their attention?
Perhaps these two positions arenāt at odds, and whatās actually at issue is a framework for thinking about how to migrate Web content between platforms. And different expectations about content that is self hosted, and content that is hosted elsewhere?