Clara Bow on the hood of 1919 Moon Motor Car. Photograph, 1926. Missouri History Museum. (Click on the image to go to MHM's Flickr site.)

Picture this: It is 1926 in St. Louis. Actress Clara Bow, the mesmerizing face of the flapper era, visits the city; she is on the threshold of a short but brilliant film career (the following year British novelist Elinor Glyn will declare her the very first “It Girl”). But on this St. Louis tour, the new starlet, cognizant of her rising fame, seeks maximum exposure. Wearing a baseball uniform embroidered with the word “Hollywood,” the plucky young Bow sits astride the hood of a 1919 Moon Motor Car, raises her cap high in the air, and mugs for the camera.

Bow, no doubt, understood photographic reproduction well enough to have envisioned her face splashed across all of the day’s entertainment magazines; with a little imagination, she may have even believed that one day she would be immortalized in a museum—this picture filed away in a vast archive alongside other film legends. Yet it is highly unlikely that Bow could have ever understood the digital life her St. Louis photo would have in the 21st century. She scarcely could have foreseen just how far her image might travel, once the Missouri History Museum transformed it from a tangible paper photograph into bits of electronic data.

MHM is currently undertaking initiatives that allow us to share digitized images, like the Bow photo, more broadly than ever before. For years now, staff have been busily scanning photographs and prints and posting digital representations of collections to the museum’s website. The Bow image, for instance, can be found in the museum’s online database. Yet, this is just one piece of the puzzle. MHM realizes that, while its own website is ideal for showcasing many wonderful pieces of the collection, the museum must also reach out and communicate with people where they are; rather than asking audiences to always find us and our website, there are efforts underway to deliver digitized content to the virtual spaces where many varied publics congregate. Flickr is one such online community where MHM artifacts, archives, and photographs can be viewed and appreciated by potentially millions.

Screen capture from the Museum's Flickr page featuring a photograph of a Lucite plastic purse, made by W. V. Baron Plastic Company, ca. 1950. Missouri History Museum. (Click on the image to be taken to MHM's Flickr site.)

Founded in 2004, Flickr is one of the most active photo and video sharing sites on the web. As I write this article, in the last minute 6,414 photos were uploaded to the site by some of the more than 2 million Flickr members—adding to the over 3 billion images now currently hosted by this popular web service. In early 2009, MHM joined many other notable institutions and museums, such as the Smithsonian, George Eastman House, the Powerhouse Museum, and MOMA—just to name a few, in establishing a Flickr account. Currently on our Flickr site you can view: the latest images capturing museum exhibitions; intriguing examples of early-to-contemporary photographic techniques/subjects; and historic objects and artifacts that tell amazing stories and teach important lessons. But that merely scratches the surface!

Here are just some of the ways we plan to utilize this service and some of the many reasons why MHM loves Flickr:

Creativity

	Pony Ballet at the Racquet Club. Photograph by A. W. Sanders, ca. 1900. Groups Collection. Missouri History Museum. (Click on the image to see MHM Favorites photo slideshow created on Flickr.)

Flickr inspires creativity. Urging “do more with your photos,” Flickr invites members to see its service as a platform for imaginative projects. Because Flickr has an API (application programming interface), which in non-technical terms means that it plays nicely with other web services, images can be arranged into endless numbers of slideshows, combined with collections submitted by other Flickr members, and turned into complex media displays and photo products (like photo books, artwork, t-shirts, calendars, etc). These new creations can then be shared on countless other websites and blogs or even incorporated into installations within the physical space of the museum. Flickr now also hosts 90-second high-definition (HD) videos—too short for long documentaries, but wonderful for explorations of detailed, historically significant photography (see the Powerhouse Museum’s “Deep in the Eyes” video. As MHM gets to know Flickr better, staff will be stretching their imaginations and trying out some of these projects using a variety of our 600,000 photos and prints.

Sharing

One of the hallmarks of web 2.0, the second-generation web design that informs sites like Flickr, is the opportunity to aggressively share digital content with interested parties. MHM has photographs not only “living” on its Flickr site, but also (thanks to Flickr’s built-in tools) populating a range of groups covering an incredible diversity of topics. It seems that for every issue, subject, or idea imaginable, there exists a corresponding Flickr group. Our Bow image, for instance, has been posted to several groups, including one dedicated to “Portraits.” This particular group has an astounding 40,000-plus members; thus, every time MHM posts to this site, there exists the potential to reach thousands from around the globe and have our photograph interpreted in a new context. One suspects Clara Bow, were she able to see her likeness shared in this manner, would be rather pleased!

History Happened HERE! St. Louis Stories. Missouri History Museum. (Click the photo to view the slideshow created on Flickr.)

In addition to joining groups, MHM is also sponsoring collecting initiatives on Flickr. Our first endeavor is the “History Happened HERE! St. Louis Stories" group site, which encourages Flickr members to contribute photos and memories related to specific geographic locations in and around St. Louis. Please consider contributing! MHM invites you to mix and mingle your digital artifacts with ours in an effort to foster a truly public history collection.

Community

Flickr + museums = rich community interactions. Museums have long wondered how to encourage public dialogue based upon their collections. Many website databases do a good job of showing, but not such a good job of providing a place for viewer feedback. Flickr remedies this problem by offering a “Comments” section on every image and allowing members to “tag” (add searchable keywords to) each photo. The Library of Congress recently released a report about its pilot Flickr project (see “The Commons” below). It has revealed that as a result of public contributions the library has been able add 67,176 new searchable keywords to photos and improve more than 500 image records by adding new information offered by Flickr members (see the report summary). MHM hopes that these kinds of interactions on our site will prove as fruitful.

				This snapshot of Randolph Smith Lyon, Mildred Frances Lyon, Mrs. Montague Lyon (Frances Robnett Smith Lyon), and Montague Lyon Jr. eating ice cream cones at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition can be found on Flickr by clicking the image. Photograph, 1904. Missouri History Museum.

The Commons

In 2008 the Library of Congress and Flickr formed a partnership, resulting in a project called “The Commons.” LOC began sharing “no known copyright” images at stunningly beautiful high resolution in an effort to encourage other cultural heritage institutions to do the same. And they have. More than 20 participating museums now share portions of their collections at print-quality resolution (allowing viewers to see every inch of a photo in extremely sharp detail). MHM has applied for a Commons account and will hopefully join this prestigious group by the end of 2009.

Please consider visiting MHM on Flickr. Visit our Clara Bow image and keep up with our constantly changing photostream; become an MHM contact; write a testimonial on our profile page; tag our photos with your own keywords; offer your comments, ideas, and notes; and let us know which photographs you enjoy and how you would like to see us share our digital content in the future.

DIGITAL MHM