Beyond Single Repositories

The Peabody Essex Museum in the USA have been working on several web projects collaboratively through the ECHO project. The project is a mix of Native and non-Native institutions within USA and is funded by Federal Government grant.

Even though ECHO is challenged by different educational standards at state and national level, they continue to work to engage young people and children in local communities. They also mentioned some cross-cultural design issues, though some issues have been successfully overcome with their interactive map and artists' gallery on newtradewinds.org.

We also listened to a Flickr representative talking about a new project called 'The Commons' (flickr.com/commons), which they developed alongside the Library of Congress. It's a more formal way for institutions to increase access their photographic collections through Flickr. The number of tags and comments added are unbelievable - in two and a half days the Library of Congress' online collection had 20,000 tags, and have had 4,000 comments so far. And some of the feedback has been added into their records, which means it's a good way for the public to contribute knowledge.