This practical introduction to Flickr treats photographs as more than illustrations: titles, captions, tags, groups, comments, and sharing can turn an image into an entry point for public interpretation. Written when online photo communities were rapidly expanding, the piece encourages heritage organizations to think about photography as networked storytelling. The larger lesson survives the platform itself: visual collections gain public value when they are contextualized, discoverable, and open to interaction.
Tag Archives: DigitalHeritage
Canon umbrella tag for digital practice in cultural heritage: access, interpretation, collections, participation, platforms, preservation, and institutional strategy.
Digital Preservation of Documents at the Library of Congress
Kit Arrington explains how the Library of Congress digitized, preserved, and shared HABS, HAER, and HALS documentation, connecting archival formats, metadata, access, and sustainable digital preservation.
3D Scanning, Rome Reborn and Virtual Ancient Worlds on Google Earth
Bernard Frischer discusses Rome Reborn, 3D modeling, virtual heritage, born-digital scholarship, Google Earth, and the long-term preservation and public use of complex digital cultural heritage.
3D Digital Rock Art Documentation and Preservation
Carla Schroer discusses 3D documentation, Reflectance Transformation Imaging, photogrammetry, training, and the challenge of moving digital heritage tools from specialist research into everyday preservation practice.
Lisa Louise Cooke on Establishing Roots in the Social Web
Lisa Louise Cooke explains how Genealogy Gems grew into a major online genealogy platform through experimentation with podcasting and other social media. This video focuses on the learning curve behind that growth and on the importance of using digital tools to create genuine connection with an audience. It captures genealogy at a moment when family-history communities were rapidly moving from individual research toward networked sharing and media production.
Dave Moyer: Teenage New Media Producer and Historic Preservation Activist
Teenage preservation advocate Dave Moyer demonstrates how digital tools could give young people a public role in historic preservation long before institutions routinely talked about youth digital engagement. The conversation brings together preservation advocacy, entrepreneurship, media production, and generational change. Its lasting value lies in showing that emerging platforms did not merely help institutions reach younger audiences; they also gave younger practitioners tools to lead and speak for themselves.
Using Ning to talk about the future of museums
Angelina Russo discusses Museum 3.0, an early Ning-based professional network created to connect museum, gallery, library, and archive practitioners around questions of social media, learning, and institutional change. The conversation quickly moves past the technical ease of creating a network to the harder challenge of sustaining one: developing participation, identifying shared concerns, and making a digital space useful enough that professionals choose to contribute their knowledge to it.
Preserving Our Global Heritage through Volunteer Archeology
Past Horizons gathered volunteer digs, field schools, archaeology news, video and podcasts into one public-facing portal. This 2009 post captures an early effort to lower the barriers between professional archaeology and people who wanted to participate directly. The portal itself faded, but the underlying model—combining opportunities, media, and community access—became a familiar part of archaeology’s digital ecosystem.
What Is Social Media?
For the last couple of years, the terms "web 2.0" and "social media" have been used for nearly anything new and interactive on the internet. Since Voices of the Past and sites like it integrate many basic social media tools, let's take the time to consider the concept of social media and its potential to advance heritage preservation.