Australian history on show - on Flickr

Thank goodness that another Australian institute has taken the step to start placing a pictorial history of Australia up in Flickr.

As reported in the Sydney Morning Herald in the article, Australian history gets Flickr treatment, the State Library of NSW has begun loading its photo collection into the online image library.

It can require a great deal of hard work and organisation to get archives into a viable state to place online (as the Powerhouse museum has already done so well).

The benefit is that a priceless visual history of Australia becomes visible to all Australians, rather than requiring people to travel to the photos to see them (such an antiquated notion!).

Eventually it may be possible to aggregate all the individual collections into a national view of Australia's past in a way never before achievable. Then through user-based tagging, comments and search, different pathways through the images can be used to tell different stories, bringing the past back to live via the people who lived through it.