George will be presenting a progress report on our Data Lifeboat initiative as part of the Innovation Showcase at the Eighteenth International Conference on the Inclusive Museum /
Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums: Engines of Innovation and Social Participation, being held 15-17 September 2025.
Flickr.com was born in 2004 and has grown to a visual archive of over 50 billion images. It is also held inside a company, which could be read as a risk to its survival, especially considering how many web platforms have dissolved over the last 20 years, taking the content down with them. We have an opportunity to preserve this unique and vast collection, and the Flickr Foundation’s Data Lifeboat initiative is our major strategy to succeed. It is a collective selection process to archive “slivers” of Flickr because essentially, Flickr.com is simply too big for any one institution to take on. Data Lifeboats can be created by anyone with a Flickr account, and sent anywhere for safekeeping, whether that be to the family Dropbox account or a traditional archiving institution. Learn how the Flickr Foundation is developing the technology and also a LOCKSS-like institutional network to get serious about preserving this fantastic visual archive for access across the next century.
