home on the range

2008.078.0018

Originally uploaded by
Douglas County History Research Center

The American West: land of the free, home of the brave, frontiersmen on the brink of discovery and families that braved it all for a piece of  the big sky.  Pioneers heeding the call of mystery: the invisible pull on your heart, a quiet whisper on the breath of the wind, that takes hold and doesn’t let go until you strap on your spurs and head out, following the sunset.

A couple hundred years later, frontier librarians have taken the charge of this bedrock region and are forging new alliances; merging melting pot wisdom with traditional American values.  The result? The Douglas County History Research Center.

reduce, reuse, re-picture

Bridge Redux Part II

Originally uploaded by zebrafactory.com

Moving across the pond, so to speak, we find ourselves down under, at the Flickr pool for something called Re-Picture Australia.  This project allows Flickr users to take public domain images of all things “australiana” from the National Library, and remix, mash-up and generally “2.0″ them into something new.  Users then title and tag their images for them to be available for display in both the Flickr pool as well as on the National Library’s project site.

This is but one part of a large project undertaken by the National Library of Australia entitled “Picture Australia.”  Essentially the National Library and many other institutions have submitted photographs to the project to be displayed in a giant, centralized digital repository. It is an ambitious project to be sure, and the thing I like about this is that they are throwing in user-submitted images right next to the institutional images. Talk about a two-way street!

advice and consent

Side show at the Vermont state fair,
Rutland (LOC)

Originally uploaded by
The Library of Congress

Now we will be turning to the eminent, the evanescent, the entropic Library of Congress, to examine their Flickr know-how.  Outlook good.

From the home page, hiding away towards the bottom-right is a link to some info about their Flickr projects.  Turns out that they have quite the collection, and they are actually co-founders of something called “The Commons,” which is a project on Flickr to generate user tags and classification for some of their public domain photographs. There are now around 15 museums and libraries contributing to and participating in this project. A similar project is underway at Steve.museum.

bookshelves akimbo

On This Day in History – Oct 9th:
Che Guevara is killed

Originally uploaded by
Clemens & Alcuin Libraries

This is too cool to pass up. Sister schools in Minnesota, St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict, have a huge collection of web-powered utilities as part of their services and I got all excited paging through all the multiple different types of Web 2.0 tools they tap into.

They blog. They podcast. They IM. They have a Flickr photostream which they actually advertise. I’m not saying that all of these things are perfectly implemented, and it looks like their online books and slideshows are somewhat of a work in progress, but so far what I’ve seen here is definitely heartening.

getting there

Hanuman’s tail as bridge

Originally uploaded by Yadupati

Here’s another great example of how to attract users and use Flickr in the process.

This summer, the British Library put on an exhibit called “The Ramayana: Love and Valour in India’s Great Epic.” Essentially, the exhibit was showcasing illuminated manuscripts of the epic story of Rama, and had a slate of other programming to accompany it. Hundreds of manuscript images were on display, and, in a wonderful moment of extreme Library 2.0 fever, someone decided to start a Flickr group to assemble some users takes on Ramayana imagery.

hidden potential

Bedford – Chapter 11

Originally uploaded by uwpglibrary

First off, I have completed a good enough draft of the Resources page to recommend you take a look at it, if you are hankering for some more Flickr stuff to do.

Secondly, I dug up some better examples of how libraries are using Flickr in the real world and I am going to list them out over the next week or so. The first one I want to talk about here is Winnipeg University Library, because they have done one of the simplest things a library can do with Flickr: an slide show library tour.

And I don’t mean simple in a bad way. I mean simple good. Simple easy. And simple effective.

(re)definition and usability

Golfer

Originally uploaded by
uwdigitalcollections

Left: a shameless plug for my former employer. Their site is here, and oddly enough, it says nothing that I can see about their Flickr account. Seems to me that they must be using this as a tool to direct existing Flickr users back to their website, and are not concerned about directing users in the other direction.

That being said, there are some nice historical photographs in their stream, and it is a comforting bit of nostalgia for me to be once again prowling around the site that I called home.

Strength in numbers

Seattle Public Library

Originally uploaded by nengard

I thought to begin, I would first have to spruce up my own Flickr account. Nothing more embarrassing than evaluating a service you know nothing about. So for my detractors, kindly take notice of the custom “blog” embedding of a Flickr photo (at left). See also the “Libraries and Librarians” widget on the right.

Not only did I spend much too much time playing with these tools, but I also could not help being fascinated (as every time I get lost online) with the extent to which you can share and interact on different platforms. In addition, I updated my profile and re-tagged some of my 28 photos. I suppose I could upload a few more, but, then again, this is an ongoing project.

The taggers are coming!

Room in Chittenden Hotel, Columbus (LOC)

Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

So, I feel a little late.

I was all excited to start my blogging assignment (see the About page) and then I read the other day that blogging was on the way out.  I consoled myself with the thought that Libraries were just starting to pick up on this “Library 2.0″ thing, so even if blogging was dead, well, I could have some super current topic to write on.  Turns out, of course, that not everyone started library school this fall, and, likewise, people have been fascinated with social networking and its possibility for libraries for quite some time.