I’m no student of history, but I’m very pleased that the National Library Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa have been adding photos from their collection to Flickr.
As I work my way through my RSS feeds each day I sometimes come upon a little treasure trove of old photos, like this one that depicts cyclists outside Canterbury College, Christchurch, ca 1880.
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The photo linked above that sparked this post is copyrighted, so I can’t include it here, darn it. [Update: thanks to Courtney's comment below I've now added the thumbnail — see the credit below.] I have however found these two images depicting buildings that are now part of the Arts Centre in Christchurch. Until 1974 though they formed the heart of Canterbury University where I studied. I attended lectures and tutorials in some of the buildings shown here.
I was one of the lucky last students who narrowly escaped studying at the new campus in Ilam.
While I’m unlikely to ever have fame thrust upon me, some very notable people studied and worked in those buildings too, including Rita Angus – Painter, Margaret Mahy – children’s author, Lord Ernest Rutherford – Nuclear physicist, and Beatrice Tinsley – Astronomer.
[Image credit: Photographic Archive, Alexander Turnbull Library. Reference number: PA1-q-094-106. Via Photos from National Library of New Zealand.]
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
This is great! Oddly enough, in the U.S., the Library of Congress started the same program on Flickr recently. It’s putting all kinds of incredible public domain historic photos in a place we can all see and learn from them. The URL, for those interested, is http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/
Hi Miraz
Great to see you’re enjoying the images! I’ve just check with Tunrbull Library staff, and you’re welcome to reproduce the image here (with credit info) . You can copy the image from Flickr, or following the ‘Find out more’ link in the caption info will take you to the image on our Timeframes website, http://timeframes.natlib.govt.nz .
We’ve been on Flickr for a bit longer than LOC, but we’re watching their partnership with Flickr with interest, and have contacted them to find out more. I blogged about this on our LibraryTechNZ blog
http://librarytechnz.natlib.govt.nz/2008/01/flickr-and-library-of-congress-launch.html
According to ATLs own factsheet (http://timeframes.natlib.govt.nz/pdfs/ATL_Timeframes_reproduction_copyright_factsheet.pdf), photos by unknown photographers – like this one – go out of copyright 50 years from when the photo was taken. In this case 1930.
As it is out of copyright (*way out*), I see no reason why you cannot reproduce it here.
To my knowledge, all of the images being published on Flickr by the LOC in the U.S. are also out of copyright and may be freely reproduced. It’s always a good idea to credit the photographer on out-of-copyright work, but I don’t think it’s actually required, since the work is part of the public domain. And if the photographer is unknown, how could someone credit him/her anyway?
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