Picture Australia

Picture Australia is an online photo archive created by staff at the National Library of Australia, using images from archives, libraries, and museums across the country, and from Flickr. The images include photographs, pictures of artworks, and pictures of ethnographic objects. All of the materials on the site are in the public domain or have been licensed to Picture Australia. Members of the public are encouraged to donate images to the collection via Flickr; images are licensed through an American nonprofit called Creative Commons. The pilot for the Picture Australia project started in 1998 and the archive continues to grow. The about page includes acknowledgements of sites and services that provided inspiration and ideas for the project coordinators-- these Australians, they're really just too nice.

Images have been organized into themes, or "trails", that can be used for browsing, or can be searched for using a broad variety of attributes: title, creator, subject, date, publisher, collection, and more. Image quality, however, can be quite poor, particularly with old b&w photographs, which often look out of focus. (Like this wombat, for example. Maybe it's because the original is bad.) The archive mostly consists of links to objects on participating repositories' sites, so there's no standardization of size or resolution or or of the metadata displayed to the user. As far as metadata linked to the object is concerned, the site uses Dublin Core, and it uses the Australian Pictorial Thesaurus to provide index and search terms. There is a metadata guide on the website for those who want to know more about Dublin Core.

it's possible to order copies of many of the images online (although not for free)- I wonder how often that service is used and whether it's worth it for the repositories. There are also free promo materials distributed through schools and libraries. I like this site's participatory nature and find it very interesting that they decided to partner with Flickr.