Flickr slide

My flickr slide discussed how you can use flickr to share and collect digital images, allow people to comment on those images and link through to your official site.

The examples I mentioned were the National Library of New Zealand, the National Library of Scotland and the Great War Archive flickr group by Oxford University.

The National Library of New Zealand started a pilot in June 2007 to post a small selection of their collection images onto flickr. They have posted about the pilot on a blog run by staff at the NLNZ:

• Awesome photo - thanks!! Or, what I've learned from our Flickr pilot

In this post they've shared information about their viewing statistics which show that they get an average of 28 views a day and have had nearly 57,000 this year.

The National Library of Scotland uses flickr to showcase its collections, giving a taster of three or four images and then linking back to their own website. According to the digital library blog they decided to use flickr and other Web 2.0 tools as "a little experiment to offer up our content to our customers where they are, rather than expect them to come to the Library or the Library’s website."

They have another interesting post on this blog which discusses the choosing of some images and uploading them to flickr.

• More fiddling with flickr

The University of Oxford is using flickr to collect images as part of its Great War Archive project. This project aimed to collect digital images of memorabilia from the First World War.

These three examples and the other organisations using flickr all benefit from the large user community that exists on flickr (26 million members according to this report). This allows them to tap into this huge market and share their collections with a global audience.