Comments on: Libraries using Flickr

By: Roxanne Missingham

Roxanne Missingham — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 23:25:09 +0000

Hi Meredith

At the National Library of Australia Flickr is used as a way of linking with the AUstralian community to collect pictures for the resource dsicovery service PictureAustralia – see http://www.pictureaustralia.org/index.html. It has been very intersting to see the thematic content collected and, perhaps more importantly, the enw engagement with communities. Pictures from Flick have also been acquired for the Library’s collection. It enables a social networking focused on images of Australia and the ability for the LIbrary to itneract with a community that may never walk into a library or think of going to a library website.

regards

Roxanne

By: brian herzog

brian herzog — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 21:05:55 +0000

I think like many libraries, mine kind of has a token flickr presence (http://flickr.com/photos/chelmsfordpubliclibrary). The only two things of note that were are doing with it are 1) documenting the painting of mural covering all the walls in our children’s room (http://flickr.com/photos/chelmsfordpubliclibrary/sets/72157600142184933/), and 2) making available to the public 100+ historical photographs (taken in our town around 1901) which had previous been tucked away and forgotten in our archive (http://flickr.com/photos/chelmsfordpubliclibrary/sets/72157600000139715/ – a local group scanned them all and gave them on disk to the library, and I uploaded them all to flickr).

By: Meredith Farkas

Meredith Farkas — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 18:31:02 +0000

Thank you all so much for these wonderful links. I wish I had more than 600 words to highlight them all!

The column on Flickr will be coming out in September’s American Libraries.

By: Michele

Michele — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 12:54:03 +0000

At Redwood City Public Library, we’re using Flickr to expose some of our local history collection and allow discovery by a much broader audience:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/redwoodcitylibrary/sets/72157600508615810/

I also love what Westmont has done for new materials by using the notes tool to link into their catalog:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/westmontlibrary/566717727/

By: Ellysa Cahoy

Ellysa Cahoy — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 14:48:51 +0000

We have a Flickr Pro account for pictures from the Penn State Libraries Open House: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8312170@N02/

This year, we are going to encourage everyone involved with the Open House–faculty, staff, attendees to upload and tag their photos so that we can access them all easily in one place.

By: Marisa

Marisa — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 21:26:41 +0000

Interesting uses of flickr – most of the above flickr collections appear to be created /contributed by the library. Are there libraries out there that are encouraging their patrons to upload their own items as well? Patrons could be asked to tag their images with a certain phrase to be sure their images are returned in the relevant results.

By: Edward Metz

Edward Metz — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 10:55:11 +0000

We use Flickr to highlight our Digital Library collections. We created a slideshow on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/59804400@N00/sets/72157600402628412/show/
of our Image collection and then this in turn I transformed into a Flash video using Adobe Captivate http://carlbookblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/carl-digital-library-flash-movie.html

By: Christa Burns

Christa Burns — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 13:37:37 +0000

Lincoln City Library’s Bennett Martin branch is using Flickr to promote their Courtyard Book Chats. They are also using the Notes to link to the books in their catalog.

http://flickr.com/photos/bookguide/

By: Jay Datema

Jay Datema — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 00:24:50 +0000

There’s a Libraries and Librarians group on Flickr, too:
http://www.bookism.org/open/2006/07/21/flickr-in-libraries/

By: Steve Campion

Steve Campion — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 21:34:54 +0000

Great idea for an article, Meredith.

Pierce County’s Flickr page started to feed images into our blogs but we’ve been consistently adding a pic a day for the 365 project Michael Porter suggested a while back. I’m trying to vary the images (people and things, ordinary and out-of-the-ordinary) so it shows the art of library life rather than sinking into endless bookshelves. A local newspaper even picked up on our first 30 day effort and we hope for more community publicity as time goes on.

Now that ALA is over, we’ve also got our eyes on a few other Flickr-related library projects to reinforce with the public all the other things we already do.