The Archive, Phase 2

[The following blog post was written in August 2009 and signified the second phase of the effort to create a Ghostsigns Archive. This has been realised with the archive opening for business on 19th Mrch 2010. Visit this page for more information.]


Commit your photos to the Ghostsigns Archive.



Just under five months ago I set out to establish the first permanent archive of hand painted advertising from the UK and Ireland in collaboration with The History of Advertising Trust (HAT).

In the original call for entries I talked about the plan to use a Flickr group to get things going. I said that "hopefully this will help to gauge how much support and willing there is out there for getting this project off the ground".

Well, the response has been fantastic and it is now time to move into the second phase of the project which is committing these images permanently to HAT. This will ensure their survival for years to come so that everyone can benefit from the work we have done in pulling this together.

If you have added photos to the Flickr group and want them added to HAT's permanent collection then please complete and return the signed form to them. This form gives HAT permission to store and use your photos without affecting your existing copyright or creative commons status.

I hope you will continue in your support of the project.

Thank you.

Ghostsigns and the long tail...

I've been doing a bit of work on the archive and recording the number of photos contributed by each photographer involved. (These are from of an edited set of about 1,500 selected from the c.2,500 so far in the Flickr group.) The graph above plots each photographer along the bottom and the number of photos from that photographer above this.

Of 350 photographers with images in this edited set:

• 9 have 20+ photos
• 25 have 10 or more
• 191 have just a single image

This is evidence of the long tail as described by Chris Anderson (see the start of the video below for another example).

What is noteworthy is that without the 191 people contributing their single images the eventual archive will be much less valuable. Many of these are unique images with no other photographers having pictures of the same sign. This is really powerful in the context of this project and shows what is possible through the mechanism employed to get the archive established using Flickr.

Thank you again to everyone involved, we are about to move into phase 2 which will involve more formally committing images to The History of Advertising Trust Ghostsigns Archive.