We also notified various American and international
organizations dedicated to the study of bookplates, such as the
International Federation of Ex Libris Societies (FISAE), because we
anticipated (correctly) that our collection would attract considerable
long-distance interest, and hoped that scholars more knowledgeable
than we would contact us with additions and corrections to our
metadata. Several sites posted our announcement, and we were
especially pleased to hear from the Australian Bookplate Society,
which noticed that Australia was not represented in our collection and
actually offered us a donation to fill that gap!
In 2008 the Pratt Institute Libraries chose to become a
participating institution in ARTstor, which meant, for us,
discontinuing Luna Insight. Our art, design, and architecture images
would be hosted as a local collection through ARTstor, but that was
not an appropriate repository for those from Special Collections and
the archives because of their unique and (in the case of the
photographs and negatives) proprietary nature. The limitations on our
financial resources meant that whatever image management software
we selected would have to be open source, but time constraints
prevented us from thoroughly examining the variety of available
systems, so our Visual Resources Curator suggested we post them on
Flickr. This turned out to be an excellent idea, because we very quickly
saw a marked increase in visitors, some of whom supplied information
that, for our bookplates, allowed us to expand or correct our
cataloging, which was precisely what we had been hoping for. The
collection logged over 300,000 views in the first nine months on
Flickr, and not a single image has been viewed less than nineteen
times! Clearly our presence on Flickr allowed individuals to discover
us serendipitously in a way not possible when they were required to
navigate our Website.
I noticed, too, that staff from the Institute’s administrative
branches, such as the Public Relations and Communications Office
and the Office of Alumni Relations and Annual Giving, more
frequently browsed the collections before making requests for
historical images, with the result that they knew exactly what they
wanted and were even able to provide us with source and identifier
numbers. This has increased the efficiency of our workflow and
document-delivery capability enormously.