I was having a fiddle on teh Internets the other evening, and I happened upon a website project that I thought that I would share with everyone. The project is Picture Australia and it is connected to the National Library of Australia. It has only been up for a little while, so I am sure that it will only get better. The point of the project is to Re-Picture Australia.
This essentially means that the site itself allows ready access to public domain images from participants, ready for people to download, mash-up and reload with new meaning into Picture Australia via a Flickr group.
I’ll quote from the media release to give you the general idea:
Now I haven’t yet had my fun, but to give you an idea of the breadth of the Picture Australia resource base itself, I (driven now doubt by ego) entered the search term ‘McCracken’.
Low and behold, the second photo was of “Private Alfred Hugh McCracken, of Brunswick, Victoria, and was taken on 21 April 1915. This particular private enlisted on 12 July 1914 and returned to Australia on 12 April 1919 with the 1st Field Artillery Brigade.”
The beauty of this is that this very Alfred Hugh McCracken, of Brunswick is my father’s grandfather (my great grandfather). You don’t get much more of an immediate connection from public history archives than that!
As another example, I searched for my home town of “Burnie, Tasmania” and found about 500 photographs over the years. Some of the shots included the Australian Pulp and Paper Mills’ lunch room from the late-1950s, and there is every chance that my mother’s father (who would have recently arrived in Australia) is there somewhere.
So if you have an Aussie connection, click the link and you might be surprised what you can find.
[As an aside, I was thinking about what other publically available archives there are. Out of interest, I had a very brief look and found a rather tragic counterpoint to the photo of Alfred Hugh McCracken smartly dressed in his uniform. That counterpoint comes in the form of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission site, and their link for the grave of Private James Morgan, of 12th Battalion, Royal Scots who died on November 3, 1915. There isn’t actually a grave to be visited though, although his name is up on the Ypres Memorial (Menin Gate). James Morgan was my mother’s grandfather.]
This essentially means that the site itself allows ready access to public domain images from participants, ready for people to download, mash-up and reload with new meaning into Picture Australia via a Flickr group.
I’ll quote from the media release to give you the general idea:
The aim of the project is to encourage the creative use of the nation’s collections and attracting new audiences who play and work in the visual industries.
We are encouraging image-makers to creatively reuse, reinterpret and ‘Re-Picture’.
Picture curators from libraries, archives, galleries, and museums from around the country have provided high-resolution images from their collections for the project. After image-makers load their ‘mash-ups’ to Flickr, they will then be transferred back to Picture Australia to ‘Re-Picture’ Australia.
Now I haven’t yet had my fun, but to give you an idea of the breadth of the Picture Australia resource base itself, I (driven now doubt by ego) entered the search term ‘McCracken’.
Low and behold, the second photo was of “Private Alfred Hugh McCracken, of Brunswick, Victoria, and was taken on 21 April 1915. This particular private enlisted on 12 July 1914 and returned to Australia on 12 April 1919 with the 1st Field Artillery Brigade.”
The beauty of this is that this very Alfred Hugh McCracken, of Brunswick is my father’s grandfather (my great grandfather). You don’t get much more of an immediate connection from public history archives than that!
As another example, I searched for my home town of “Burnie, Tasmania” and found about 500 photographs over the years. Some of the shots included the Australian Pulp and Paper Mills’ lunch room from the late-1950s, and there is every chance that my mother’s father (who would have recently arrived in Australia) is there somewhere.
So if you have an Aussie connection, click the link and you might be surprised what you can find.
[As an aside, I was thinking about what other publically available archives there are. Out of interest, I had a very brief look and found a rather tragic counterpoint to the photo of Alfred Hugh McCracken smartly dressed in his uniform. That counterpoint comes in the form of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission site, and their link for the grave of Private James Morgan, of 12th Battalion, Royal Scots who died on November 3, 1915. There isn’t actually a grave to be visited though, although his name is up on the Ypres Memorial (Menin Gate). James Morgan was my mother’s grandfather.]
Comments
Thanks for the link.