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More genuine awesomeness. Our very own Powerhouse Museum, just today, has become the first museum to join The Commons on Flickr. They will be uploading photos from The Tyrell Collection, a series of glassplate negatives from around the turn of the century, to their Flickr stream. Sections of this collection have been available at the museum’s website for many years, yet it remains largely unseen by the general public. The most obvious thing that making the photos available on Flickr does is that it exposes them to a much wider and diverse group of potential viewers, who can tag and comment on these photos, adding to their findability and usefulness as a resource.

But that’s only one aspect of what is genuinely pioneering with what The Powerhouse has done here. What being added to the Commons means is that these images are provided as having “no known copyright”, allowing maximum possibility for their reuse. I’m a believer in the idea that reuse is what keeps a cultural artifact alive. Walt Disney took gruesome medieval stories that were in the commons and breathed new life into them. Hip Hop took breaks from music that had been lost and re-introduced it to vast new audiences. The more times something is copied, the greater it will exist in a format readable by future generations (See Clay Shirky on Digital Preservation – Google Video).

So, if you’re on Flickr, get in there and add the Powerhouse as a contact for a little dose of Australian nostalgia every day. And the beauty is, if you find something that means something to you, you can do whatever you like with it.