The CRC’s image collection is available through the LUNA image discovery tool, and can be accessed here.

This is great, but there’s a need to get the collections well-publicised, through as many means as possible, and because of this, the Digital Imaging Unit advised that a linked Flickr site would be a good vehicle to draw users in. The Digital Library Development team investigated ways of linking LUNA data to Flickr, and came up with a solution that involved interrogating the LUNA database, populating some MySQL tables, and using PHP to generate Flickr-compatible XML. From here, the Flickr App garden- an ‘Aladdin’s Cave’ of useful interfaces to Flickr resources- was checked to find a suitable load API, and indeed we found one. The results can be seen here:

CRC LUNA Flickr site

Metadata for the records includes Title, Rights Statement, Description, Tags (Creators, Subjects, Ids, Shelfmarks) and a link back to the high resolution LUNA record.These highlights have had their metadata enriched by volunteers to improve the presentation of the records. However, there is a lot of work to be done to get all of LUNA up to this standard, and we’re aware of the need for more cataloguers. Could crowdsourcing be a valid approach to this? There’s a debate for another post!

Thanks to DIU interns Alice Tod and Jessica Macaulay for their hard work on these items.