One of the cultural institutions that contributed to the Flickr Commons is the
Brooklyn Museum, and people who saw their images at Flickr contributed, too – adding tags, annotating images, spending time sharing what they knew and enriching the pool of images. Once a platform becomes the major place people go for something, it’s where they contribute. Libraries learned that adding social features to their catalogs is one thing; getting people to use them is another. Amazon and Goodreads already scooped up the public attention, and even big catalogs like Worldcat have trouble getting a critical mass of contributors. For images, that attention space was owned by Flickr, and there was a lot of work contributed there by a major cultural institution and by individuals who wanted to share their knowledge, all living on a platform that decided to make some changes that broke it, for at least some important purposes.
That’s not really why the Brooklyn Museum decided to pull out of Flickr, though. They simply were seeing a decline in visitors. (History Pin was also not drawing a big enough audience, so they pulled out of that, too.) They moved images to the Wikimedia Commons. I’m all for that – it’s a good place to put images that can be reused and it’s not as likely as Yahoo to break things carelessly. The museum was able to migrate some of the user-added content from Flickr, according to a comment at Inkdroid, where I first read about this issue. But some of it would be lost if someone hadn’t scraped and saved it.
This all raises a fascinating question: when we entrust cultural materials to Web platforms that seem open and inexpensive and hugely popular, we are also entrusting our futures to them.
full article: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/museum-vanishes#ixzz2yZu3uo1v
Inside Higher Ed 
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