Automated Bulk Uploading of Images and Metadata to Flickr

Abstract

The Digital Initiatives department at Miami University, like most Digital

Initiatives and Special Collections, has a large amount of rich digital image collections,

stored primarily in a third-party database. Typically, these databases aren't findable to

the average web user. It was our desire to expose these collections to the wider web

environment. We immediately thought of Flickr, the most prominent website for image

discovery and sharing. Our problem was scale; the default uploading interface was too

inefficient to push forward with the project. We developed a set of PHP scripts devised

to interact with Flickr's API to allow for quick and efficient uploading of images as well

as metadata such as titles, subjects, tags, and hyperlinks back to our collections. Once the

scripts were in place the uploading process was completely automatic. Miami University

Library’s Digital Initiatives department has uploaded over 5,000 images using this

method and the results have been outstanding. New users are consistently attracted to

the content and in about a year there have been nearly 200,000 views of our images. This

article will discuss Flickr and the importance of contributing library materials to these

types of social media sharing communities; explain the technology and programming

involved in the project, and discuss our results and the outcomes of project.