Nova Scotia Archives' photostream  

'Nova Scotians at Home and Abroad'

The Nova Scotia Archives is pleased to announce its first crowd-sourcing project on Flickr. Some 150 photos, selected from a large collection of nitrate negatives, have been digitized and are available on this site, waiting for you to explore and add comments about them.

The images are all outstanding examples of state-of-the-art amateur photography, most of them over 100 years old, showing Nova Scotians having fun at home and far away. The travel photographs are especially striking, featuring Japan, Italy, Western Canada, the United States…. and many places we can't identify.

The images all share something in common: we don't know a lot about them, because they arrived with little metadata — photo titles, locations, descriptions, years, and other important details were generally not recorded. This is where you can help! You may recognize the mountain that's being climbed by early 20th century hikers. You may spot your grandfather in a group of YMCA campers. You may know the name of the vessel carrying travelers to Japan. By simply adding a tag you can help us fill in a century-old gap and contribute to making this collection infinitely more accessible.

We've included some biographical information about the photographers — James Fraser Paige, George Walker MacKay, Arthur Bloomfield Dawson, Ben Church Hicks, William Ringsleben and several others — but beyond this, we look forward to you helping us with details about the images themselves.

A variety of archives, museums, libraries, and historical societies currently participate on Flickr, including the George Eastman House, the Library of Congress, the Brooklyn Museum, the Nationaal Archief, National Archives and Records Administration (USA), the State Library of New South Wales, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Archives participating on Flickr regularly attract large numbers of tags and comments attached to their images. These additional details provide minute details, and sometimes identify people and locations within photos that were previously unknown.

Jennifer Gavin of the Library of Congress, the founding member of the Flickr Commons, wrote about their success with Flickr in a January 2010 blog entry on the LC Website:
"As of today, there have been more than 23 million views of the images and more than 27,700 Flickr community members call us a contact. In two years, we have loaded more than 8,000 images in two collections (historic photographs and historic newspapers) in 12 sets on diverse topics ... Over a thousand records in the Prints and Photographs online catalog have been enhanced with information from the Flickr Commons community. More accurate and detailed information in our catalog, with links to interesting histories, makes the pictures not only easier to find but easier to understand."

We hope to find similar success in our first crowd-sourcing effort and we thank all visitors for their interest and participation.