Flickr Foundation is back and happy to welcome two new Flickr Commons members on board. They’re ready to share their Flickr digital archives with the public so get to know a little more about the Archives at NCBS and Boston Public Library. Also learn more about a big new project in our Creative Archives program!
Archives at NCBS is an archive of contemporary history of science at National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India, part of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. They have a catalogue of 150,000 objects in 25 collections. They’re joining Flickr Commons in order to increase access to these objects and more widely share their collection which includes stories of South India and the colonial period.
Their first collection they are sharing are selections from the Leslie Coleman Papers. Coleman was the first Director of Agriculture in Mysore State and was instrumental in setting up agricultural research and agricultural education institutions there. These initial images are from Coleman’s family photo albums.
Group photograph: Leslie C Coleman, Davison and others, undated
The lone woman in this image is Coffee Pudi (Coffee Powder) Sakamma, a woman who established the first coffee drying and powdering unit in Bengaluru and became a successful businesswoman in the early 1900s.
Meeting of Meetings of Mysore Agricultural and Experimental Union, undated
They have also shared images from the Carl D’Silva Papers. D’Silva was a wildlife artist, a bird illustrator who worked with ornithologists and others to help create field guides to local birds. However, he worked in many wildlife areas and one photo shows him (standing, left) creating a pegasus out of dental clay for a famous entrepreneur’s swimming pool in Goa.
Carl D’Silva’s unlikely birds, undated
Wildlife and nature are a theme in many of the NCBS images, from the very big to the very small.
Photograph of a playful moment between a kumki elephant and its mahout, 1967
Microscopic Image, undated
Boston Public Library is the third-largest public library in the United States. They have had a longtime Flickr presence with almost 100,000 digital images; they’re joining us at Flickr Commons with a new account to share images with no known copyright restrictions. Their old digital presence included a combination of photography, ephemera, and a lot of baseball and politics.
Fitz Globe Manufactured by Ginn & Heath c. 1879
Ellen Fitz, a governess from New Brunswick, was the first woman involved in the design and manufacture of globes and invented the vertical rings which delineate daylight, twilight and nighttime around the globe. Their new account is starting with a focus on seminal works from their Prints Department. They’ve begun with a striking collection of etchings by Goya.
They write, “Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) was a prominent Spanish artist who was named as court painter for Charles IV in 1789. Prints by Goya have been part of Boston Public Library’s collection since Albert H. Wiggin’s 1941 gift established the library’s Print Department. Wiggin’s gift included complete early editions of the Tauromaquia and Proverbios, as well as two lithographs from the series The Bulls of Bordeaux. Later gifts and purchases brought BPL’s Goya holdings to their current extent of over 200 works.”
These illustrations are cool and strange, created by Goya after a long period of illness. They are noted for their “realistic portrayal of the monstrous, their convincing absurdity, and their compelling grotesqueness”.
Una reïna del circo = Une reine du cirque/Dancing on a slack rope, i.e. Skating on thin ice. Published 1877
¿No hay quien nos desate?/Can’t anyone untie us? 1799
El sueño de la razon produce monstruos/The sleep of reason produces monsters. 1799
Saltar el toro con palo/Jumping the bull with a stick. 1815
If you are an organization with a photographic collection and are curious about joining us for the long haul, please register your interest in joining the Flickr Commons today!
The Flickr Foundation’s new internal project
The Flickr Foundation, steward of Flickr Commons, turned three years old May 12th, 2025, though revitalizing Flickr Commons has been in the works for much longer. Flickr Commons itself turned 17 in January. Flickr Commons has grown to one hundred and fifteen member institutions on five continents. The collection has 1.8 million digital images which have been viewed a staggering 4.59 billion times.
Our purpose is to keep Flickr pictures visible for 100 years and we believe this requires the Foundation to also live for 100 years. That means we’re developing techniques as an organization to prepare our contemporary work so it’s visible to future team members who haven’t been born yet. Our first step on this journey is a new initiative we’re calling Digital Daybook. It’s designed to help us track our own activities and progress, successes and slightly-less-successes. We’ve found it’s been a great tool for reflection which helps us make better, more resilient plans for the future.
