A VIVID Picture for Australia.

• Author: Hooton, Fiona
• Position: National Photography Festival

The VIVID National Photography Festival being held for the first time in Canberra celebrates the vital role of photography in Australian life and history. The festival is an unprecedented opportunity to appreciate the richness of this enduring medium.

Picture Australia, the online portal to over 1.5 million images of Australiana, is a key resource in accessing this visual heritage. For Picture Australia the festival has provided the creative licence to experiment with new ways to engage audiences.

Building on the service's now renowned use of Flickr, the photo sharing website, events planned in association with the festival have brought online audiences together with representatives from their cultural institutions for the first time. A public event, a video launch and the creation of a third Picture Australia Flickr group have all aimed to provoke debate about improving access to Australian collections using social media.

Hosted by the National Library of Australia, Picture Australia was created to provide a single access point to the rich pictorial collections of memory institutions like galleries, archives, libraries and museums. Until the Library's Flickr project began in 2006, it was mostly a historical resource. Since then an open invitation has stood for everyone to contribute their images to Picture Australia via...