Dear All,
[cross post to commons-l and wikimediaaustralia-l]
Picture Australia is interested in adding Commons photos to their service but has several technical issues they would like to resolve first. Can we help?
Picture Australia is an archive aggregation service run by the National Library of Australia and aggregates searches across many Australian institutions (such as the various state libraries, universities, government departments) and also Flickr. You can see the project at http://www.pictureaustralia.org/index.html and you can see their other contributors at http://www.pictureaustralia.org/contribute/participants/index.html
This is a quote from the email written to me from PA: At the moment our main source of contemporary images is Flickr and we are interested in investigating other sources of contemporary images. There are a few issues with the Wikimedia Commons that we foresee: 1- the metadata quality is highly variable. With Flickr contributors are able to provide a fair bit of additional metadata about their images. Before pulling images in from Wikipedia we'd need the data to adhere to some basic standards. (see http://www.pictureaustralia.org/contribute/metadata.html). 2- there are certainly a number of images that have been sourced from Picture Australia or our contributors. Pulling these in would create an issue with duplicate images and would likely confuse users if they were attempting to buy a copy. 3- Wikipedia doesn't have an OAI interface so we would need to look at how to ingest the data.
I would add a 4th concern, and I'm not sure if this is a big problem or easily fixed, is that most of the pictures on Commons are not relevant to PA. Would we be able to provide a feed of only the relevant categories?
All the best, - Liam Wyatt