Home Schooling’s Flickring Life Line – UK’s National Archives Steps Up Its Caribbean Collection of Photos
Need a photograph of downtown Port of Spain, from let’s say, 1899? Or, ever seen a picture of Haiti’s first Mardi Gras? Flickr, the world’s largest repository of photographs – 6 billion and counting – is a useful tool for a family’s home schooling duties.
For the past decade, Flickr has been working with more than 135 archives, museums and historical associations to make historic photographs and graphic treasures available to the public for personal and school use. Now, in this period of forced home studies for school aged children, the Flickr archive programme (called the Commons) is proving to be an easy to use, resource with pictures you can’t easily or freely get anywhere else!
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| Guadeloupe woman 1899 |
Canadian museums, the George Eastman Museum, the US Library of Congress, The State Library of New South Wales and the Smithsonian are just a few of the institutions freely making their material available to internet users. In the past two years, The UK National Archives has been creating a Caribbean Collection of photographs dating back to the invention of the camera!
The National Archives’ collection of Caribbean images is drawn from the Ministry of Information and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and span over 130 years of history.
“In partnership with community groups and heritage partners, people have used the collection to inspire exhibitions, reminiscence sessions, workshops and poetry,” explains the National Archives. “These images from the Colonial Office library photographic collection (and the Central Office of Information British Empire collection of photographs have been added to Flickr so that (you readers) can comment, tag and share them easily.”
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| St Vincent kids 19th cent. |
Many of the other institutions posting images to the Commons have early days Caribbean photographs, but not in the numbers that the growing online National Archives’ Caribbean Image Collection has.
Almost every island that the British government set foot on the late 19th century and early 20th century is included in this growing collection. Most are in black and white, although there are some early glass negative photographs that have been hand coloured. As well there are colour photographs from the 1950s and beyond.
Not heard of Flickr? Flickr is a Canadian developed website (now American owned) that freely hosts images that can be used, copied and often shared. It was created in 2004 and is used by institutions and millions of amateur and professional photographers.
The home page for Flickr is at https://www.flickr.com/. Its Commons sites (museums, archives and historical societies) at https://www.flickr.com/commons#faq The UK National Archives’ Caribbean Collection is found at https://www.flickr.com/…/nati…/collections/72157630635006206
Weir article in May 20th Caribbean Camera
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