Happy travelers, photo buffs and grandparents aren’t the only ones who have discovered Flickr. The staff of the Duke University Archives also chose to use the popular photo sharing website when they created an online collection of some of their photographs.
The Archives staff assembled the virtual photo collection for the convenience of the Duke community, alumni, and others who use historical images of the University and campus life in brochures and other publications, websites, publicity, and research. Dubbed the “Duke Yearlook,” the Archives site is a longitudinal yearbook organized by decades. Several thousand images the Archives staff have scanned for researchers over the past several years were the starting point for the site, which presents both student life and campus scenes. The staff will continue to scan and add images to the site to insure that every decade is represented in various categories.
The Archives staff hopes to fill gaps in the photographic record of the decades with images donated by alumni who visit the site. Site visitors are also invited to identify themselves in pictures and add comments and recollections.
There are several ways to find the Duke images on Flickr: search for Duke Yearlook or Duke-related images on Google; go directly to flickr.com and search for Duke images to find the site; or follow the link from the Archives homepage at http://library.duke.edu/uarchives/.
Next up for the Archives?—The staff plans to post and/or enhance Wikipedia entries related to Duke history and biographies of Duke leaders.
I am thrilled to see the Duke Images over at Flickr. It is a shame, however, that you have not set the preferences to allow anyone to TAG the photos. I have been tagging some of the Brooklyn Museum images this evening, hoping to help make them easier for people to find. Since I know nothing about the Brooklyn Museum, I decided to take a look at your photos and do a bit of tagging so that others would be able to find them more easily when they do searches for all kinds of things from UNC to Oranges to Wallace Wade.
I hope you will change the preferences to allow me and others to tag these photos so that they become more useful to and findable by the world at large.