Illustration of Human Skull. Credit: "65-5376-2" by otisarchives1 on Flickr (PD)

Mike Rhode, the chief archivist at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, a medical museum run by the US Army, has released hundreds of photographs from their digital archives on Flickr under a CC-BY license:

“You pay taxes. These are your pictures,” Rhode said. “You should be able to see them.”

The collection includes images of injured veterans, medical treatments (like the hernia operation above), the first airplane crash investigation, and public health warnings about the dangers lice posed to World War II soldiers.

[...]

“We have pictures from all types of military conflicts and all different types of medicine and issues in medicine,” Rhode said. “We love the stuff that we’re able to play with and want to bring it to everyone else in the world.”

While this is a great thing, there are some problems. First, if these photos were taken by US government personnel in the course of their duties — like, say, military archivists — shouldn’t these photos be in the public domain, not CC-BY? Also, why Flickr? There are better places to archive these public domain digital photos — the Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons both come to mind.

Again, this is a good thing, but the execution seems poor.

• Flickr page for archives
• Wired Blog article

Fulton Street Dock, Manhattan skyline, Manhattan. Source: http://flickr.com/photos/nypl/. Public Domain.

The New York Public Library has uploaded images to Flickr Commons, a project to share pubic photos from cultural institutions.

We are delighted to be the latest institution to join in this endeavor, with an initial contribution of 1,300 images culled from various areas of our diverse photographic collections.

We think of this as a sort of appetizer course, a sampler of collections accessible in greater breadth and depth on the NYPL Digital Gallery, and on-site in our network of libraries. Lush images of modern dance pioneers; haunting early cyanotypes of algae (the first photographic works to be produced by a woman); majestic geographical surveys taken along the Union Pacific Railroad, iconic Depression-era images taken under the Farm Security Administration’s famed photography program; Berenice Abbott’s epic documentation of 1930s New York for the Federal Art Project; stunning 19th century vistas of the Egypt and Syria; scenes and portraits of Ellis Island Immigrants, the Statue of Liberty under construction… These and more are now available to view, tag and discuss in the Flickr Commons, and are offered as an invitation to explore further on our own site or in our actual libraries. After this initial road test, we expect to post many more images into the Commons pool.

The NYPL asserts that the images are in the public domain.

• The New York Public Library
• Boing Boing