Our department holds photographs and newspaper clippings of the Mafeje Affair, including 2 issues of the "Underground Varsity". This month, students who were involved in the sit-in will be gathering here at UCT for a reunion.

We took this opportunity to mount a digital exhibit on our web site of some of the photographs that we have of the protest. (View them via http://www.lib.uct.ac.za/mss)

Apart from the actual content, what's interesting about this exhibit is the platform that I chose for it. I've been watching academic library and archive use of Flickr for a while now and even experimentally uploaded a few photographs of Cape Town to get a feel for it. What I love about Flickr is that you're sending your content out, rather than waiting for people to come and look at your site. I also like the social aspect of it: the tagging and commenting facility allows viewers to provide more information about the photograph than the archive originally had. 

Since starting with Flickr, I've been making contact with a number of other libraries and archives who are using it as a platform for their digital content. 

Yesterday, I came across these interesting discussions about the use of Flickr. There seems to be a bit of a debate about whether Flickr is appropriate for academic content. 

My opinion is that it all depends what your intention is in the first place. Do you want to reach out to new audiences? Do you want to ask people to supply more information or even more content to an existing collection? Then Flickr is the perfect place. 

Go and have a look at the exhibit. It's still a work in progress - there are a few more images to be added - but you'll get the general idea. 

Edited to add: I forgot to say that it's impossible to upload photos onto Flickr from UCT campus! I've had to do all the work from home. Something to do with ISA? Who knows....