The Long Arc of Web-Scale Digital Library Projects
[This post assembled from a BlueSky thread and a LinkedIn post, both from October 2024.]
Why has the Flickr Commons lasted for 16 years, whereas other major digital projects and platforms have shuttered or faded?
It's true that the Flickr Commons isn't entirely the same as it was in its heyday, but it still has solid engagement and participating members who put time and energy into it. And importantly, it has lasted long enough to see new life and thought being put into it by George Oates and the others at the Flickr Foundation, like with their Data Lifeboat program.
I find myself excited by the thoughtful approach they're taking, and the recognition of the value of the sheer mass of human curation and care that has gone into Flickr accounts over the years via captioning, tagging, description, open licensing, and more.
I don't know precisely what led to Flickr Commons lasting as long as it has — I'm sure luck had some role, as did savvy design from its earliest days. But I've been thinking a lot about it, especially as news coming from other areas of large-scale digital libraries hasn't been uniformly positive:
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DPLA seeking a new home for its cultural heritage work: while perhaps understandable given the costs of centralized aggregation, it still saddens me given the industry-wide excitement and high hopes we all had in ~2011–2012. With the ebook part of DPLA going to Lyrasis, and the cultural heritage aggregation work now moving elsewhere, what is the remaining portfolio for DPLA? Will it continue to exist? If so what will it pursue in the name of a national digital public library?
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HathiTrust shuttering the Research Center: Hathi itself as far as I know is going as strong as ever, and as with DPLA I can understand the strategic decision to focus efforts and funding elsewhere, but it still saddens me that the really compelling idea of deep research possibilities on a substantial portion of the corpus of published human output didn't quite land and wasn't as self-evident as I hoped it might be.
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Internet Archive contending with both hackers and a series of serious lawsuits: one of the things I'm most proud of from my time at IIIF is working with the community to upgrade and formalize IA's IIIF infrastructure, because they are one of the only huge platforms online to offer incredible service with truly low barrier to entry. But while that work was happening, the lawsuits related to CDL were playing out, and now the lawsuits related to the Great 78s project are ramping up. And now they've just had to deal with quite a serious attack on their infrastructure and a data breach to boot.
These three orgs are of course not all totally comparable — it's certainly a bit reductive to boil them down to recent news bullet points. But I think a lot about these large-scale digital library efforts at a high level, and I'm fascinated by the very different arcs that Flickr, DPLA, Hathi, and IA have all traced out over the last 10–20 years, and how they have intersected more or less with broader GLAM desires and ambitions over the years.
Things have seemed pretty glum lately, but I'm encouraged by the work the Flickr Foundation folks are doing to breathe new life into that platform in a thoughtful way.
There are also some interesting parallels between Bluesky and the AT Protocol starting out as a research project at Twitter — the Flickr Foundation folks are similarly researching how Flickr content (photos and social graph elements) might have a useful life beyond the existence of Flickr itself.