An Archive of the Smithsonian Institution's Flickr Commons account

Why are you making this particular Data Lifeboat?
I made this archive to send across to the Public Data Project at Harvard University - https://lil.law.harvard.edu/our-work/public-data-project/. They are working on preservation of and access to large government-oriented datasets. In 2025, they also gathered about 700TB of open data from the Smithsonian Institution for safekeeping, and this Data Lifeboat is a small supplement to that.

This archive contains 3,308 photographs, but maybe more importantly, it also contains all the "social metadata" that has been added to the photographs by the Flickr community: tags, comments, curation... basically anything added by people once the photos have been uploaded. This is unique to the Flickr context, so it'll be great to add in to the PDP's Smithsonian archive.

What's important to you about these photos?
I am the creator of the Flickr Commons program, and you can imagine how proud I was when, back in 2008, the Smithsonian Institution signed on as our third partner. I had the pleasure of working with the late, great, Effie Kapsalis to get them set up, and thoroughly enjoyed the SI Archive's curation of photography over the years. All of these photographs are historic, of course, but for me, they are important because of when and how the Smithsonian joined into the nascent program I had created.

Of course, I should note for the record that I do not own any of these photographs. They were published into the Flickr Commons program with no known copyright restrictions.

What is it for?
This Data Lifeboat was built for personal, educational, commercial, archiving and machine learning use.

Additional Questions

Imagine your Data Lifeboat is unearthed in 60 years from now. What would you want the person looking at it to know?
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And what would you want them to know about you?
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How would you feel if someone made this Data Lifeboat public after that length of time?
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Can you think of anything you wouldn't want that person to use this Data Lifeboat for?
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What do you know about the people in these pictures?
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Are you a member of the community or communities depicted in this Data Lifeboat?
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How do you imagine those people would feel about you including pictures of them?
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Can you think of any potential privacy issues people in the images may have concerns about—or be compromised by? Even a long time from now?
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Who would you like to share this Data Lifeboat with?
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Where are you planning to keep it?
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Do you think this archive contains any sensitive information future viewers should know about, even in comments or descriptions?
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What unintended consequences or potential harms can you envision?
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If you think about this Data Lifeboat coming from a moment in time, what else could you say about the collection? What contemporary information or trends or contexts might be interesting to note?
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What kind of harmful material is lurking in this Data Lifeboat, or what convinced you there isn't any?
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If you could donate this Data Lifeboat to any archive in the world, which one would you choose, and why?
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