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George Oates, Flickr Commons and How To Preserve our Cultural Heritage in the Digital Era (Part I)
n 1986, the BBC decided to launch an ambitious cultural project meant to last for decades, if not centuries. The Domesday Project invited people across the UK to share valuable cultural information, ranging from descriptions of daily life in their communities to photographs, social statistics, maps, and even “virtual walks” through their neighborhoods and other public spaces. Children, schools, and families were eager to contribute to a project whose original purpose was to commemorate the famous Domesday Book of 1086, compiled 900 years earlier. Back then, this medieval manuscript contained valuable information about landholdings and eventually became a comprehensive census of 11th-century England. The manuscript had survived until 1986 (and still survives today), but the BBC, together with Philips and Acorn Computers, quickly recognized that a new time was about to begin: the digital era, bringing with it a brand-new generation of so-called “digital files” and groundbreaking ways of storing various types of data. Such a time, they correctly anticipated, would require a new way of preserving cultural information for the future.
Technology had to be put in place to support such an endeavor. The digital files — which included interactive video and still images — were stored on LaserDiscs, the first commercial optical disc storage medium, each offering 300 MB of storage per side. Spread across just two discs, The Domesday Project also required a specific computer to be accessed: the BBC Master, a home computer produced by Acorn Computers in 1984–86. The project appeared to have all the elements for long-term success: cutting-edge technology, a rich record of everyday life in the UK during the late 1980s, and the financial backing of an institution like the BBC, with decades of experience shaping the country’s cultural landscape.
What could possibly go wrong? Surely such a brand-new technology would prove resilient.
Although they correctly anticipated the digital paradigm that lay ahead, the BBC and its partners could not possibly have anticipated the speed at which digital files, computers, and software would evolve.
It was doomed. By 2002, only sixteen years after the project began, much of the technology behind the Domesday Project had become obsolete. It is now one of the foremost examples of a phenomenon that has since become all too common: digital obsolescence. Yet the cultural record assembled in 1986 remains invaluable to the history of the United Kingdom. For that reason, preservation efforts have continued since the turn of the century despite the technological challenges surrounding the project. In 2011, the Domesday Reloaded project sought to salvage most of its contents by making them available on a website, which itself went offline in 2018. In 2020, Domesday86 explored the use of emulators and specialized software to access the project’s data. It seems as though every five years or so a new preservation effort is needed simply to keep the original project accessible.
In contrast, the 1086 Domesday Book, a remarkably simple technology made of animal skin, iron gall ink, and other pigments, remains undeterred. Accessing its contents, though carefully safeguarded, is as simple as turning a page.
The Birth of Flickr Commons
George Oates understands these challenges. Originally from Adelaide, Australia, Oates has been working online since 1996. She was part of the founding team behind Flickr, where she designed much of the interface that helped make the website feel intuitive and approachable rather than too technical or intimidating for the early internet user. Chances are you have used Flickr. If so, you have probably interacted with Oates’ work.
Launched in 2004, originally with a chat room functionality, Flickr rose to prominence during the early years of social media. It quickly became a place where people could upload photographs, share them with friends and family, tag them, and organize them accordingly. As the community grew, an unexpected pattern began to emerge: people started uploading photographs not only to share them, but also to preserve them.
Professional photographers backed up their archives on Flickr. Families and aficionados uploaded old photographs to safeguard their histories. Around the world, people were naturally using the platform as a repository for memories, places, and traces of life before the Instagram-era. Cultural institutions began to take notice. The Library of Congress recognized that millions of photographs on Flickr, organized by thousands of amateur historians, researchers, and volunteers, represented a valuable record of American culture. Libraries could have never cataloged such a vast number on their own.
What emerged from this happy accident was a horizon of possibilities: What if this could be formalized? What if cultural institutions had a structured way to share their collections on Flickr alongside millions of personal photographs, all tagged, organized, and enriched by a diverse, global community?
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Guided by these questions, Oates founded Flickr Commons in 2008.
You can recognize the original spirit behind The Domesday Project in what Oates envisioned for her new project. The idea of a global community getting together to share vast collections of photographs that together constitute a vast repository of cultural heritage, is not unlike what the BBC had in mind in 1986. Oates was tasked with reimagining how museums and libraries could use Flickr to share their collections. She approached the challenge from a designer’s perspective, asking new questions about how people could possibly interact with digital culture.
Her central insight was radical in its simplicity: a search box is a poor welcome to a rich collection. Museums and libraries have spent decades organizing their collections through sophisticated metadata systems. Yet all of that expertise is often compressed into a single search box. You type what you’re looking for, and either you find it or you don’t.
But what about everything you weren’t looking for? What about serendipity, exploration, or the joy of following your curiosity through unexpected connections? Isn’t that how we tend to explore museums or art galleries?
By exposing the collection to the curiosity of the user, Flickr Commons slowly started to advocate for better online practices for cultural archives in the digital era. Websites, unlike physical museums or public libraries, can’t possibly reveal the vast number of their collections just by looking at their landing page. Oates’ idea of providing a rich variety of images for you to explore instantly acts as a very effective solution to the idea of how to communicate the abundance of cultural archives in the digital era.
Oates’ question was simple: What if we designed interfaces that revealed the shape of a collection? That showed people what exists instead of hiding it behind a search box? That made it possible to wander through millions of photographs, discovering rather than merely retrieving?
What about the future?
Unlike The Domesday Project, Flickr Commons has effectively survived for almost twenty years, and over 100 cultural institutions from around the globe are backing its vast repository of digital media. This is not just limited to one country or one institution either as decentralization has proven to be an effective solution for long-term sustainability. The program is backed by public and government funding, as well as private donations and philanthropic grants by institutions like the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Still, digital obsolescence continues to pose a serious challenge.
Oates understands this and to plan for the future, in 2023 the Foundation launched a new and even more ambitious initiative: The 100-Year Plan. Among many other things, Oates and the Foundation understand the importance of developing long-term archiving strategies so that photo files, metadata, tags, and historical descriptions survive platform changes, format obsolescence, and cloud storage risks. Long-term preservation, the Foundation argues, must be designed from the beginning.
What will the future bring?
At Almenara Institute, we believe research and analysis are at their best when paired with real-world examples from the people building the future. It is in their work that abstract questions about preservation, access, and cultural resilience become concrete design choices affecting millions of people. This issue introduces you to one such person: George Oates, whose work at Flickr Foundation offers lessons about how good design and strategic planning in the digital era can save culture. Stay tuned for Part II, where George Oates discusses these questions in depth, from cultural preservation and emerging technologies, including AI, to what it really means to plan for the century ahead.
Every month, The Lighthouse will cover a core element of our reports, examining across radically different contexts how this technology is interacting with and modifying our lives. If you enjoyed Part I of this issue, we invite you to read our latest report where we explore film preservation through the lens of decentralized storage with a detailed case study on the Prelinger Archives and Filecoin Foundation. Follow us on Substack.
