Tag: photography

Wikipedia work in 2024

Posted on by jessamyn

A very old photograph of two men and a burro standing outside a small wooden shack in the middle of a forest with immense trees. One man is wearing a dark top hat looking had and a dark vest over a white shirt and solid boots. The other man is wearing a workshirt but is otherwise in shadow. The donkey is wearing a pack. The image has a small metallic frame and appears to be held in place (where?) with a screw at the lower center of it.

I do work on Wikipedia sometimes. Since I’ve been working for the Flickr Foundation, my life overlaps more with free content. Sometimes I try to combine work and play and add things to Wikimedia Commons, or to Wikipedia, or both. My username in the Wikipedia extended universe is Jessamyn, so it’s pretty easy to see what I’ve been up to. Here’s my wrap-up of 2024 Wikipedia stuff I did.

– Uploaded 81 images to Wikimedia Commons (see them)
– Uploaded 15 images to Wikipedia (usually for obits, or logos, cases where the image doesn’t have a free license, see them)
– Wrote 33 articles (see them)
– Made 755 edits.

It was a decent year. My absolute favorite thing from the year was finding this “selfie” of M. M. Hazeltine (above). Hazeltine was a photographer born in Vermont in 1827. He went out West to seek his fortune, came back to Vermont, learned photography, and went back out there. This image from the 1850s was taken when he and his brother were working a gold claim in California. It was in UC Berkeley’s special collections and I think I found it through Calisphere. One of the weird things about a lot of public domain images is that stock photography organizations tend to scoop up images that are publicly marked as public domain, put their watermarks all over them and try to sell them to people. This is legally allowed, but because of the way search engines work, it can be tough to find the original public domain images. Having those images on Wikipedia helps.

I’m aware that Wikipedia is imperfect. However, it’s a nice hobby for someone into free culture and photography, as I am. This year’s work didn’t feel like too much bored (or grumpy) editing and a lot more “Hey this neat thing should be in there” so here’s to more neat things going in there in 2025.

Librarians: have Robert Dawson over for tea

Posted on by jessamyn

Thanks to Library Bazaar, I now know about the Kickstarter project of Robert Dawson who is traveling the country taking photos of libraries. If you’re not familiar with Kickstarter, it’s a way to crowdsource fundraising for creative-type projects. I’ve supported a few things including the GET LAMP text adventure documentary and a recent MC Frontalot video. If Dawson is coming to your town, or even near it, I’d suggest giving him a call.

some amazing international libraries, not the usual set

Posted on by jessamyn

Biblioteca
photo by Laureà, thank you!

I never get tired of these gorgeous photos of library buildings, but I do feel like I’ve seen the same ten libraries ten times each. This list of lovely libraries has a few new ones and is using a nice non-click-bait format where you can look at them all at once. I wonder sometimes if photos of libraries are more likely to be Creative Commons licensed than other sorts of photos? [thanks eileen!]

some odds and ends from the mailbag

Posted on by jessamyn

As per usual I’ve returned from holiday travelling with a lot of cool links to share and the admission that I’m behind on my blog reading — and this is me who is never behind, this is all deeply distressing to me — and I bet you are too. Anyhow, some things I’ve enjoyed reading over the past few days. I’m putting a Computers in Libraries column to bed today and it’s talking about widgets. I like talking about widgets.

  • Phone box becomes mini-library – small community in Somerset turns old phone box into a lending library/free box for books.
  • Portsmouth (NH) public library is having a documentary showing of DIY Nation + artist get together this weekend which looks like fun and a nifty type of program to boot. Plus I sort of stupidly like that they can link right to the book in their catalog. It’s 2009, how many of us can do that yet?
  • One line update/coda to the Des Moines photography situation from the DMPL marketing manager “At this month’s meeting, our board voted to remove the requirement that permission be granted for photos to be taken in our library.” Woo!
  • Curious to know what’s going to happen at the Hayward (CA) libraries when they go to a Netflix model for lending [pay up front, then no overdue fees]. Looking forward to seeing the crunched numbers at the end of this.
  • In another neat model, ArchivesNext reports on the Amsterdam City Archives’ “you ask we scan” approach to digitization. There are some linked slideshows and further data. Interesting model.