For Westerville's 150 year celebration, we were charged with pulling together a quick web site featuring a small number of photos (less than 100). The intent of the site is to highlight the history of Westerville, but also to market the library's local history collections during the celebration year. We thought about building an elaborate site, but opted to experiment with Flickr API options instead. The result is that all of the photos have been added to the broader Flickr collection, but are nicely highlighted on a dedicated site for the Celebrate Westerville initiative.
Using Flickr as a tool to digitize small photo collections is integruing. Digitalization software often comes with hefty price tags, and Flickr offers a low-cost solution for those defined small projects.
As for larger digitalization efforts, the specialized software becomes more cost effective and practical (being able to control your back-up procedures and data is important for large data sets), however, utilizing Flickr as a way to merchandize the online digital collections is a possibility. I'd suggest pulling a small number of the photos posting them on Flickr as a way to peak interest, and hopefully point traffic back to the larger collection.
The web community knows about Flickr, but they might not know about your online collections. These are two practical ways to put Flickr to work for you.
