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Chapter 6: Accurate Digital Colour Reproduction on Displays: from Hardware Design to Software Features by Dr. Abhijit Sarkar

January 16, 2019

The sixth chapter in Partners for Preservation is “Accurate Digital Colour Reproduction on Displays: from Hardware Design to Software Features” by Dr. Abhijit Sarkar. As the second chapter in Part II: The physical world: objects, art, and architecture, this chapter continues to walk the edge between the physical and digital worlds.

My mother was an artist. I spent a fair amount of time as a child by her side in museums in New York City. As my own creativity has led me to photography and graphic design, I have become more and more interested in color and how it can change (or not change) across the digital barrier and across digital platforms. Add in the ongoing challenges to archival preservation of born-digital visual records and the ever-increasing efforts to digitize archival materials, and this was a key chapter I was anxious to include.

One of my favorite passages from this chapter:

If you are involved in digital content creation or digitisation of existing artwork, the single most important advice I can give you is to start by capturing and preserving as much information as possible, and allow redundant information to be discarded later as and when needed. It is a lot more difficult to synthesise missing colour fidelity information than to discard information that is not needed.

This chapter, perhaps more than any other in the book, can stand alone as a reference. It is a solid introduction to color management and representation, including both information about basic color theory and important aspects of the technology choices that govern what we see when we look at a digital image on a particular piece of hardware.

On my computer screen, the colors of the image I selected for the top of this blog post please me. How different might the 24 x 30-inch original screenprint on canvas mounted on paperboard, created fifty years ago in 1969 and now held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, look to me in person? How different might it look on each device on which people read this blog post? I hope that this type of curiosity will lure you develop an understanding of the impacts that the choices explored in this chapter can have on how the records in your care will be viewed in the future.

Bio:

Abhijit Sarkar specializes in the area of color science and imaging. Since his early college days, Abhijit wanted to do something different from what all his friends were doing or planning to do. That mission took him through a tortuous path of earning an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering in India, two MS degrees from Penn State and RIT on lighting and color, and a PhD in France on applied computing. His doctoral thesis was mostly focused on the fundamental understanding of how individuals perceive colors differently and devising a novel method of personalized color processing for displays in order to embrace individual differences.

Because of his interdisciplinary background encompassing science, engineering and art, Abhijit regards cross-discipline collaborations like the Partners for Preservation extremely valuable in transcending the boundaries of myriads of specialized domains and fields; thereby developing a much broader understanding of capabilities and limitations of technology.

Abhijit is currently part of the display design team at Microsoft Surface, focused on developing new display features that enhance users’ color experience. He has authored a number of conference and journal papers on color imaging and was a contributing author for the Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology.

Image source: Bullet Proof, from the portfolio Series I by artist Gene Davis, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Florence Coulson Davis

Election Eve: Fighting for the Right to Vote

November 6, 2012

In less than six hours, the polls in Maryland will open for the 2012 general election. Here on ‘election eve’ in the United States of America, I wanted to share some records of those who fought to gain the right to vote for all throughout the USA. Some of these you may have seen before – but I did my best to find images, audio, and video that may not have crossed your path. Why do we have these? In most cases it is because an archive kept them.

Of course I couldn’t do this post without including some of the great images out there of suffragists, but I bet you didn’t know that they had Suffrage Straw Rides.

Or perhaps Suffrage Dancers?

Here we see a group from the Suffrage Hike to Albany, NY in 1914.

Fast forward to the 1960s and the tone shifts. In this excerpt from a telegram sent to President Kennedy in 1961, civil rights activist James Farmer reports on an attack on a bus of Freedom Riders:

We also find images like this one of the leaders of the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, DC:

In Alabama from 1964 to 1965, a complicated voter registration process was in place to discourage registration of African-American voters. If you click through you can see a sample of one of these multi-page voter registration forms. In a different glimpse of what voter suppression looked like, listen to Theresa Burroughs tell her daughter Toni Love about registering to vote in this StoryCorps recording:

Finally, you can watch Lyndon B. Johnson’s remarks on the signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6th, 1965.

These records just scratch the surface, but at least they give you a taste of the hard work by so many that has gone into gaining the right to vote for all in the United States. If you are a registered voter in the USA, please honor this hard work by exercising your right to vote at the polls Tuesday!

Blog Action Day: Flickr Commons Images of Acquiring Water

October 15, 2010 6 Comments

In honor of this year’s Blog Action Day theme of Water, I wanted to share some stunning images from the Flickr Commons. The images I have selected, contributed by cultural heritage institutions from around the world, show methods of transportation or acquisition of water. I will let the images speak for themselves below, but next time you go to turn on the tap water in your home – think of all of those for whom getting water is a huge challenge each and every day. While most of the images below are from decades ago, easy access to safe, clean water is still a current issue. Please consider supporting an organization like Charity: Water, a non-profit organization bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. 100% of public donations directly fund water projects.

And now.. the photos!

Summer scene, N.Y. - drinking water from street pump (LOC) — 1910: Drinking Water from Street Pump, NY

Catskill aqueduct. ... Contract 58. March 4, 1913. — 1913, Catskill Aqueduct

Filling an Indian pot with water from the cart — 1918, Central France, Filling pot with water from a cart

[Native girls, Marken Island, Holland] (LOC) — 1890: Native Girls in Holland

Ways of using a divining rod (LOC) — 1910: Ways of using a divining rod

Alice Thompson, Besoco, West Virginia, Is Shown with Milk Bottles Her Neighbors Furnish Her Water with after Her Water Lines Were Cut Off. She Is Divorced From a Coal Miner Who Was Imprisoned for Killing a Man 04/1974 — 1974: Alice Thompson, Besoco, West Virginia, Is Shown with Milk Bottles Her Neighbors Furnish Her Water with after Her Water Lines Were Cut Off. She Is Divorced From a Coal Miner Who Was Imprisoned for Killing a Man

Faro Caudill drawing water from his well, Pie Town, New Mexico (LOC) — 1940: Faro Caudill drawing water from his well, Pie Town, New Mexico

Ada Lovelace Day: Portraits of Women in Technology

March 24, 2010 5 Comments

What does a brilliant female scientist look like? In honor of the 2010 Ada Lovelace Day, I went on a hunt through the Filckr Commons and other sources of archival images to see how many portraits of women who have contributed to science and technology I could find.

A few years back I read Malcolm Gladwell‘s book Blink. One of the ideas I took away was the profound impact of the images with which we surround ourselves. He discusses his experience taking an Implicit Association Test (IAT) related to racism and his opinion that surrounding oneself with images of accomplished black leaders can change ones ‘implicit racism’. Project Implicit still continues. I found a demo of the ‘Gender-Science IAT’ and took it (you can too!). “This IAT often reveals a relative link between liberal arts and females and between science and males.” My result? “Your data suggest little or no association between Male and Female with Science and Liberal Arts.” My result was received by 18% of those taking the test. 54% apparently show a strong or moderate automatic association between male and science and female and liberal arts.

My inspiration for this post is to find images of accomplished women in science and technology to help young women and girls fight this ‘automatic association’. How can you imagine yourself into a career when you don’t have role models? Lets find the most varied assortment of images of what female scientists and technologists looks like!

The Smithsonian has an entire set of Women in Science images on the Flickr Commons about which they wrote a fabulous blog post over on their Visual Archives Blog. Consider the difference between the Smithsonian Flickr set of Portraits of Scientists and Inventors and that of Women in Science shown below in my snazzy animated GIF.

For me, the first set goes a long way to associate what a scientist or inventor looks like to images of white men with varying degrees of facial hair. I don’t see myself in that set of photos, even though there are a few women mixed into the set. The Women in Science set shows me women and, even though the images are black and white and reflect the style of another era, I can imagine myself fitting in with them.

Digging into a few specific examples within the ‘Women in Science’ images, on the left below we see research scientist Eloise Gerry who worked for the US Forest Service from 1910 through 1954. The caption from this image is “Dr. Gerry in her laboratory with the microscope that helped give the great naval stores industry in the United States a new lease on life.” On the right we have Physicist Marie Curie.

Over on the website of the Smithsonian’s Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology I found a few more images. On the left we have mathematician Tatiana Ehrenfest, from the first half of the 20th century, and on the right a physicist from the 1700s, marquise du Châtelet, Gabrielle-Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil. These were not easy to find – I did in fact skim through all the names and photos listed to find the two shown here.

After thinking a bit about the shortest path to more images of women in science and technology I went onto Freebase.com. I was so pleased to discover how easy it was for me to find entries for computer scientists, then filter by those who were female and had images. This gave me the faces of Female Computer Scientists, including those shown in the screen shot below (and yes, that is Ada Lovelace herself 2nd from the left in the top row).

I was excited to find more images and next I pulled together a list of Female Scientists. Finally a bit more diversity in the faces below (and there are many more images to explore if you click through).

Finally, I put a call out on both Twitter and the DevChix mailing list asking for women to share images of themselves for use in this blog post. Within just a few hours I received photos of Lorna Mitchell (a PHP developer in the UK – photo by Sebastian Bergmann), Aimée Morrison (shown crafting a social multimedia curriculum for DHSI 2010), Kristen Sullivan and a group photo of the DC LinuxChix dinner at ShmooCon.

There are many sources of images of women who have contributed to or are members of the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, but one of the best are archives. Consider the photo credits page for the website dedicated to Biographies of Women Mathematicians which credits 9 different archives for images used on the site.

Images are so powerful. The preservation of images of women like those mentioned above is happening in archives around the world. The more of these images that we can collect and present in a unified way, the more young women can see themselves in the faces of those who came before. It sounds so simple, but imagine the impact of a website that showed face after face of women in science and tech. Of course I would want a short bio too and the ability to filter the images by specialty, location and date. I think that Freebase.com could be a great place to focus efforts. Their APIs should make it easy to leverage images and all the structured data about women in tech that we could possibly dream to collect. I know that many of the posts created today will feature photos of amazing tech women, how do we organize to collect them in one place? Who wants to help?

If you know of additional archival collections including images of tech women, please let me know!

Happy Ada Lovelace Day everyone!

Encouraging Participation in the Census

March 5, 2010 3 Comments

While smart folks over at NARA are thinking about the preservation strategy for digitized 2010 census forms, I got inspired to take a look at what we have preserved from past censuses. In specific, I wanted to look at posters, photos and videos that give us a glimpse into how we encouraged and documented the activity of participation in the past.

There is a dedicated Census History area on the Census website, as well as a section of the 2010 website called The Big Count Archive. While I like the wide range of 2010 Census Posters – the 1940 census poster shown here (thank you Library of Congress) is just so striking.

I also loved the videos I found, especially when I realized that they were all available on YouTube – uploaded by a user named JasonGCensus. I am not clear on the relationship between JasonGCensus and the official U.S. Census Bureau’s Channel (which seems focused on 2010 Census content), but there are some real gems posted there.

For example, in the 1970 Census PSA shown below we learn about the privacy of our census data: “Our separate identities will be lost in the process which is concerned only with what we say, not who said it”. We are shown technology details – complete with old school beeping and blooping computer sounds. (NOTE: this video is also available on Census.gov, but I saw no way to embed that video here – hence my cheer at finding the same video on YouTube)

For the 1960 census, a PSA explains the new FOSDIC technology which removed the need for punch-cards. With the tagline ‘Operation Rollcall, USA’, the ad presents our part in “this enterprise” as cooperation with the enumerators. In the 1980 PSA the tag line is ‘Answer the Census: We’re counting on you!’ and stresses that it is kept confidential and is used to provide services to communities. By the time you get to the 1990 and 2000 PSAs we see more stress on the benefits to communities that fill out the census and less stress on how the census is actually recorded.

I also found some lovely census images in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs catalog including the image shown here and:

Exploring the area of Census.gov dedicated to the 2010 census made me wonder what was available online for the 2000 census.

Wayback Machine to the rescue! They have what appears to be a fairly deep crawl of the 2000 Census.gov site dating from March of 2000. For example – the posters section seems to include all the images and PDFs of the originals. I even found functional Quicktime videos in the Video Zone, like this one: How America Knows What America Needs.

The ten year interval makes for a nice way to get a sense of the country from the PR perspective. What did the Census Bureau think was the right way to appeal to the American public? Were we more intrigued by the latest technology or worried about our privacy? Did they need to communicate what the census is used for? Or was it okay to simply express it as an American’s duty? I appreciate the ease with which I can find and share the resources above. Great fun.

And for those of you in the United States, please consider this my personal encouragement to fill out your census forms!

Update: The WashingtonPost has an interesting article about the ‘Snapshot of America’ series of promotional videos for the 2010 census. Definitely an interesting contrast to the videos I reviewed for this post.

National Archives Transitions to Flickr Commons Membership

February 16, 2010 2 Comments

Even with the recent announcement that the Flickr Commons is not currently accepting new applications, there are clearly still applications being processed. NARA has been on Flickr since February of 2009 and loaded 49 sets of images. As announced in a recent press release, on the first of February 2010 Flickr flipped the switch and all the images in the The U.S. National Archives’ photostream was shifted over into the Commons.

The 49 sets are sorted into 4 collections:

Historical Photographs and Documents (19 sets) – including NARA favorites like Rosie the Riveter and Nixon and Elvis and documents from regional archives across the country.
DOCUMERICA Project by the Environmental Protection Agency (27 sets) – one set dedicated to top picks and the rest organized by photographer. Interestingly, NARA’s website has indexed the 15,000+ images from this project by subject and by location. I wonder how the picked which image from DOCUMERICA to port over to Flickr?
Mathew Brady Civil War Photographs (2 sets) – currently 473 out of the 6,066 digitized Mathew Brady images are uploaded into the Commons. The images posted in the Commons are available in a much higher resolution than they are within ARC. A great example from this collection is the image of the Poplar Church (image shown to right) available as a 600 x 483 GIF on ARC and as a 3000 x 2416 JPG on Flickr. This image also has gotten a nice set of comments and tags.
Development and Public Works (1 set) – the only set in this collection consists of images taken to support the Flathead Irrigation Project. “The Project was initiated to determine rights and distribute water originating on the Flathead Indian Agency in Montana to both tribal and non-tribal land.” These images seem to be the same resolution on both archives.gov and Flickr.

In honor of this transition, NARA posted a new set of 220 Ansel Adams photographs. One of the first comments on the set was “low-res scans? Pretty big letdown.” Fine question. As noted above, other images from NARA in the Commons much larger than the 600 x 522 that seems to be available for the Ansel Adams images. It would be great to have a clear explanation about available resolutions published along with each new set of images.

NARA has published this simple rights statement for all NARA images in the Commons:

All of the U.S. National Archives’ images that are part of The Flickr Commons are marked “no known copyright restrictions.” This means the U.S. National Archives is unaware of any copyright restrictions on the publication, distribution, or re-use of those particular photos. Their use restriction status in our online catalog is “unrestricted.” Therefore, no written permission is required to use them.

NARA has also posted an official Photo Comment and Posting Policy and a fairly extensive FAQ about the images they have post on Flickr. I do wish that there was a simpler way to request reprints of images from the Commons. Most of the NARA images have this standard sentence – but for someone not familiar with NARA and more accustom to one click ordering, the instructions seem very complex:

For information about ordering reproductions of photographs held by the Still Picture Unit, visit: www.archives.gov/research/order/still-pictures.html

I also wish that more of the images had location information assigned – only 113 of the images show up on the fun to explore map view. At first glance it looks as if this information is populated only for images taken near airports. There are many images that include a location based subject in the image description posted on Flickr, yet do not include geographic metadata that would permit the image to be shown on a map. The one image I did find that was not at an airport but did include geographic metadata is this image of the World Trade Center assigned to the NYC Financial District Flickr Location. While I could add a location related tag to NARA’s images, there does not appear any way for the general public to suggest location metadata.

One odd note about this and other World Trade Center images – the auto-generated tags have broken up the building name very oddly as shown in my screen clip on the left.

Another fun way way to explore the NARA Flickr images is to visit the ‘Archives’ page (slightly hilariously titled “U.S. National Archives’ Archives”). Here we can browse photos based on when they were uploaded to Flickr or when they were taken. Those images that include a specific date can be viewed on a calendar (such as these images from 1918) or in a list view (those same images from 1918 as a list), while those taken ‘circa’ a year can be viewed in a list with all other images from sometime that year (such as these images from circa 1824).

Beyond all the additional tags and content collected via comments on these images, I think that being able to find NARA images based on a map, calendar or tag is the real magic of the commons. The increased opportunities for access to these images cannot be overstated.

Take this image of a sunflower. If you visit this image on archives.gov, you can certainly find the image and view it – but good luck finding all the images of flowers as quickly as this Flickr tag page for NARA images of flowers can. Even looking at the special Documerica by Topic page doesn’t get me much closer to finding an image of a flower.

It will be fun to watch what else NARA chooses to upload to the Commons. I vote for more images that are assigned metadata such that they show up on the map and calendar. I will also put your mind at ease by telling you that the lovely ladies at the top of this post are their because their image is one of the most popular uploaded by NARA to date (based on it having been marked a favorite by 88 individuals). The only image I could find with more fans was the classic image of Nixon and Elvis with 250 fans at the time of this posting.

What is your favorite NARA Commons image? Please post a link in the comments and if I get enough I will set up a gallery of Spellbound Fan Favorites!

Image Credits: All images within this blog post are pulled from NARA’s images on the Flickr Commons. Please click on the images to see their specific details.

Archival Photographs as Art: A Part of Larry Sultan’s Legacy

December 16, 2009 2 Comments

Larry Sultan was famed as both a photographer and archives researcher. He passed away on Sunday, December 13th, 2009 and his obituary in the New York Times describes his use of archival photographs as “harnessing found photographs for the purposes of art while using them as a way to examine the society that produced them”. The 59 photographs, selected in collaboration with Mike Mandel from a broad assortment of corporate and government archives, were originally displayed and published as a collection named ‘Evidence’ in 1977. A reprint of Evidence was published in 2004, including a new scholarly essay and additional images not in the original.

The Stephen Wirtz Gallery has a number of images from the 2004 exhibition available online and features this great summary of the original project:

Sultan and Mandel created the series Evidence with documentary photographs mined from image banks of government institutions, corporations, scientific research facilities, and police departments. An NEA grant gave the artists a persuasive edge in gaining access these resources, and images were selected for their mysterious and perplexing subject matter. The series was presented in an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1977, and simultaneously collected in the book Evidence, which is recognized among the most important publications in the history of photography. Removed from their original contexts and repositioned without references to their sources, these images challenged the viewer to examine the conceptual concern of identifying meaning and authorship in the creation and consideration of the art photograph.

I used WorldCat to find the closest copy of Evidence and happily found a copy of the 1977 imprint at the Art Library at the University of Maryland, College Park. It had been a long time since I had looked at photographs on paper and bound in a book rather than on a computer monitor. I love the idea of re-purposing of archival image – but I was also fascinated to realize that the word ‘archive’ does not appear anywhere in the publication. Even the description above mentions ‘image banks’, not ‘archives’.

The organizations thanked at the start of the book included major corporations, U.S. federal agencies and a long list of highway, fire and police departments. Sultan and Mandel seemed to focus their research efforts in California and Washington, DC – perhaps due to a need to limit their travel. While today one would likely still need to travel to many archives to find images like those used in Evidence, there are so many images available online (at least for preview). How would someone approach a project like this now?

It is so easy to create a slide show or website featuring images from repositories from around the world. Even the images that have not been digitized have a decent chance of at least being mentioned in an online finding aid. The recently introduced Flickr Galleries make it easy to select up to 18 images from across Flickr – like my November Flickr Commons Photos of the Month Gallery. Also, much of the online culture of reuse encourages giving proper attribution for materials.

Part of Evidence’s power is the extraction of the images from their original context and their unexplained juxtaposition with one another. Finding and harvesting an image online would make it much harder to entirely strip that context away to leave the raw image behind. I can imagine a web-wide hunt for an image’s origin. While that might be fun (maybe an archives answer to the DARPA Network Challlenge?), it would not be the same as a sleek hardback book with 59 stark, unlabeled, black-and-white photos that sits on the shelf of an art library.

I find it poetic that Evidence’s photos are a perfect example of a ‘secondary value’ of archival records, even though the images were literally evidential records necessary for the carrying out of daily business. That said, I don’t believe that ‘possibly useful to future artists’ is a typical reason given for retaining and preserving archival records. We are just lucky that artists have been (and will almost certainly continue to be) innovative in their hunt for inspiration.

If you have the opportunity, I encourage you to sit quiety with a copy of Evidence. The images include landscapes, explosions, deep pits, plants, rocks, people, planes, machinery, wires and a car on fire. My laundry list of contents cannot begin to do the images justice – but I hope that they might wet your appetite.

This combination of gallery exhibition and book has inspired me to wonder about other similar projects that specifically leverage archival images for artistic purposes. Please list any that you are aware of in the comments (be they in gallery exhibitions or published volumes).

Flickr Galleries: Fun with Flickr Commons

October 12, 2009 1 Comment

Over the past month I have been playing with Flickr’s new Galleries. Each gallery is limited to 18 images from anywhere in Flickr (provided that the image owner has made their image available for inclusion in galleries). I thought it might be fun to try my hand at picking the best of the new images added to the Flickr Commons each week.

Each Thursday over the past month I have created a Commons Picks of the Week gallery from the all the images added to the Commons in the prior 7 days.

Here are the galleries from the first month of my experiment. Let me know what you think.

Each week I had about 150 new images from which to select my 18 favorites. Since many institutions seem to load their images each week along some thematic lines, sometimes I felt like I had too many of one kind of image. Moving forward I may switch to bi-weekly or monthly to get a larger pool of images from which to pick.

I think there is a lot of room for making fun thematic galleries from images in the Commons. I tried my hand at this too and came up with Bathing Beauties of the Commons. Of course the fact that all images across Flickr can co-exist in these galleries means that Commons images now have another way to be pulled into the public eye next to other ‘regular’ images.

I have a short wish list of enhancements I would love to see:

slideshow option for display of the gallery within Flickr
a way to embed a gallery on an external website as a slideshow
some way to follow the new galleries created by an individual (RSS feed or subscription option)

If you try your hand creating a gallery of Commons images, please post a link as a comment to this post so we can all take a look.

DH2009: Digital Lives and Personal Digital Archives

June 25, 2009

Session Title: Digital Lives: How people create, manipulate and store their personal digital archives
Speaker: Peter Williams, UCL

Digital lives is a joint project of UCL, British Library and University of Bristol

What? We need a better understanding of how people manage digital collections on their laptops, pdas and home computers. This is important due to the transition from paper-based personal collections to digital collections. The hope is to help people manage their digital archives before the content gets to the archives.

How? Talk to people with in-depth narrative interview. Ask people of their very first memories of information technology. When did they first use the computer? Do they have anything from that computer? How did they move the content from that computer? People enjoyed giving this narrative digital history of their lives.

Who? 25 interviewees – both established and emerging people whose works would or might be of interest to repositories of the future.

Findings?

They created a detailed flowchart of users’ reported process of document manipulation.
Common patterns in use of email showed that people used email across all these platforms and environments. Preserving email is not just a case of saving one account’s messages:
- work email
- Gmail/Yahoo
- mails via Facebook
- Twitter
Documented personal information styles that relate skills dimension to data security dimension.

The one question I caught was from someone who asked if they thought people would stop using folders to organize emails and digital files with the advent of easy search across documents. The speaker answered by mentioning the revelations in the paper Don’t Take My Folders Away!. People like folders.

My Thoughts

This session got me to think again about the SAA2008 session that discussed the challenges that various archivists are facing with hybrid literary collections. Matthew Kirschenbaum also pointed me to MITH’s white paper: Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use.

I am very interested to see how ideas about preserving personal digital records evolve. For example, what happens to the idea of a ‘draft’ in a world that auto-saves and versions documents every few minutes such as Google Documents does?

With born digital photos we run into all sorts of issues. Photos that are simultaneously kept on cameras, hard drives, web based repositories (flickr, smugmug, etc) and off-site backup (like mozy.com). Images are deleted and edited differently across environments as well. A while back I wrote a post considering the impact of digital photography on the idea of photographic negatives as the ‘photographers’ sketchbooks’: Capa’s Found Images and Thoughts on Digital Photographers’ Sketchbooks.

I really liked the approach of this project in that it looked at general patterns of behavior rather than attempting to extrapolate from experiences of archivists with individual collections. This sort of research takes a lot of energy, but I am hopeful that basically creating these general user profiles will lead to best practices for preserving personal digital collections that can be applied easily as needed.

As is the case with all my session summaries from DH2009, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

Yahoo & Google’s Search for Reusable Images and the Flickr Commons

June 13, 2009

When I read about Yahoo Image Search’s recent addition of a filter to return only creative commons Flickr images, I got all excited about what this might mean for images in the Flickr Commons. So I raced off to the Yahoo Image Search page to see how it works. The short answer is that the new special rights setting of no known copyright restrictions that they created for members of the Flickr Commons apparently doesn’t count.

For my test I searched for an exact match on “Ticket with portrait of George Washington”. This returns one result – the one image in Flickr with the same name, from The Field Museum in Flickr Commons. If you click on the ‘More Filters’ link, you will see other ways to filter your Creator permits reuse - Yahoo image search results – including the option to restrict your results to only include images whose creators permit reuse.

Next I clicked in the ‘Creator allows reuse’ and my one result disappeared! Quite disappointing in my book.

Google is also getting onto the ‘make it easy to search for reusable images’ bandwagon. Search Engine Land reported that Google Images Quietly Adds Creative Commons Filter. That post pointed me to Google Operating System‘s search interface that lets you play with the options that Google has available. After a clicking through to some of the images returned by a Google Image Search for creative commons images of archives, the way the Google model appears to work is to look for creative commons badges or links on the page with the image. I even found Flickr creative commons images, but when I tried to find my Flickr Commons image of the ticket used above for my Yahoo image search experiment it wasn’t returned by Google either.

So if an archives (or museum or library) posts images on a page that indicates that the content is licensed under creative commons, it seems those images will then appear in Google’s image search as reusable. That is good news! Another way to get users to find your public domain images.

The question I am left is how to resolve the gap between Flickr Commons’ ‘no known copyright restrictions rights statement and both Google and Yahoo’s definition of reusable content.

Category: photography