Last week phase one of the launch of the project LSE: a History in Pictures, with over 500 digitised images from our archives went live on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lselibrary/ The official launch date is 3rd November, but even without publicity there has already been an extraordinary response to the photographs with around 20,000 hits in five days.
The purpose of the project is two fold in making the images available for the wider public as well as for internal use at LSE. The project was a response to the growing interest, over the last five years, in the use of the images by academic researchers, family historians, the media and internal departments. When I was selecting the images some of them seemed as if they could really only appeal to alumni or present members of the school, but the short time on Flickr has already demonstrated that people use them in very different ways. One of the ways that it is possible to see this is by looking at the tags that Flickr users add to the photographs. There are expected ones, such as the addition of ‘author’ for H.G Wells, but also those that tag the clothes that someone is wearing, facial expression or old computer models. As the project is ongoing until May 2010 by which time there will be at 1000 images on the site, it is useful to have this kind of feedback in choosing which images to include.
The selection process has also made me think about how institutions choose to record themselves visually. In some respects ‘choice’ is the wrong word, some of the images that we hold of the school are from random donations or from departments that must have had an enthusiastic photographer at one point. The ‘official’ pictures tend to be formal portraits of academic staff, shots of high profile events or building work in progress. While these are useful records, what they miss is the general day to day existence of the school, and it is these that are often the most evocative and telling. We are fortunate that a set of images around the school was taken in 1964 alongside the making of a BBC documentary. Another set was taken in 1981. While the formal portraits etc are generally well documented, less detail is generally recorded for the informal pictures- in for example the names of the students or the location have not been written down. The current project changes the way that different kind of images have been valued over time. One of the hopes is, as Flickr is interactive, that alumni will be able to fill in some of the gaps, identifying people or providing some stories behind those pictures.
Tags: LSE