Week 6: Mid-week question
Now that you have been sharing your photos with colleagues, friends and family, it’s time for you to reflect. The reflection question is an optional part of the week, designed for you to take a step back from the ‘doing’ and think about whether or not this particular 2.0 tool is useful to your library.
Contribute to the discussion here by posting your comments to about photo sharing. Some questions to consider:
- Do you think that photo sharing services could be useful for you? Why?
- What do you think about the Library of Congress flickr and social tagging experiment?
- What is next for photo sharing in your library?
Post your comments and read/respond others’ comments, too!
April 17th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
I do see some potential in utilizing Flickr for the medical library. You could use it to archive photographed/documented procedures, or maybe photos from CME events or grand rounds. We record our Grand Rounds and put them on DVD, maybe when Flickr or YouTube increase their upload capacities it could be useful then. So, I think there is some potential in the future but for now I use it mostly for personal use.
April 17th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Do you think that photo sharing services could be useful for you? Why?
For my professional job…maybe. We are starting to create brochures using pictures of us teaching classes. This maybe a place to store pictures so that we can get them easily and freely.
Personal life - sounds fun to share with family and friends (not everyone for me)
I can see photo sharing or storing as a great place for historical collections, photos,etc. So that researchers everywhere can get the picture (asking for copyright, of course) they need without having to come to the library (very much what digitization did)
What do you think about the Library of Congress flickr and social tagging experiment?
I think it is an interesting idea to help them identify their photos. I hope, however, that it is truthful. I worry about the truthfulness behind wikipedia, too. Is this a scholarly source of fact or truth or theory? I think that it is inovative that the LC is trying to keep up with technology and help define some of their pictures along the way. It has also opened pictures to the public.
What is next for photo sharing in your library?
Not really sure. See comment for question one.
April 17th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
I looked at LOC’s flickr page a while ago and wanted to take another look before posting, but it took a long time and 3 tries to load. That was annoying. I like the idea of putting the pix out there to be potentially identified. I wouldn’t rely on the information as fact. Is LOC going to transfer images they deem correctly identified to their regular site? It didn’t say on their flickr pilot page.
I have a lot of photos on the library web site I maintain at school; I wouldn’t put them in a place where comments could be made because my audience is high school. I’m handy with PhotoShop, so I just make photo galleries and put those on my web site.
For personal use I love photosharing and have been doing it for a long time. I use googlephotos/picasa and it’s really easy.
April 18th, 2008 at 12:21 am
Since our medical library began in 1893 as the state’s medical society library, we have a whole collection of historical photos, and it would be nice to have access to them in one place, not to mention preserving them from further decay (especially the newspaper items.) How is this done? By scanning? How did the Library of Congress in their wonderfully ambitious flickr project load their old photos? I am new to this type of technology. Further, I think the majority of people will edit the LC photos honestly, and the project will be a great success, just like Wikipedia, which, I have heard, is about as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. I think occasional monitoring and requiring edit citations that can be verified will keep things above board.
April 18th, 2008 at 7:01 am
Regarding the LC Flikr posted pix: I think it has real potential, like a lot of social experiments, that this one is flawed. Perhaps it was just serendipity, but the photos that I examined seemed to have been “tagged” frivolously, with funny, but silly, captions. One caption was, I think, aiming at being leud, but missed the boat due to some rather atrocious spelling so came off as nothing less than pathetic.
I am hoping someone is going to be verifying the tags before it gets loaded to a database for posterity.
In the meantime, it’s great having some of these photos available and licensed so that people can use them without having to wait for the bureaucracy to grant individual permission for use.
April 18th, 2008 at 9:16 am
I agree with some of the other posters that tags potentially identifying LoC photos/people in photos will likely have to be verified. Who will do this? Will this be incredibly labor intensive? Regardless, having this ability is priceless and I think it’s a very exciting project.
If you have an image collection, what are the advantages or disadvantages of using Flickr versus other digital management solutions? For instance, the Library of Congress mentions that it already has one million digitized images on its site. If you are the possessor of a few thousand medical history photos, what would make you choose one or the other? I’m trying to get a handle on reasoning because I don’t actively work with photo collections…
April 18th, 2008 at 9:59 am
I’m not quite sure how to implement this photo sharing feature into our Medical Library, but patron ease of use would be pivotal to any implementation. However, I am encouraged by the reading about the Creative Commons organization. I hope that it offers a robust option to the strangling copyright provisions offered by some of our commercial publishers and gives us more flexibility in Web 2.0.
April 18th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
I did a little more reading at the LOC site about this flickr experiment. All of these photos and more are housed already on the LOC site. In a way, this is a duplicated effort on their parts to see how they can get tagging and the read/write web to work in their favors. And, yes, they are reviewing the comments made and following up when additional identifying information is provided. They also request that the commenter say “how” they know this information. It doesn’t sound like LOC will take all these comments and clarifications at face value. They are still operating with a sense of reliability etc.
As far as the technical specs and how they uploaded the photos, they reveal that as well. They used the flickr API and tweaked it a bit and did them in batch uploads. Read here for more info: http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_pilot_faq.html#load . This also allowed some of the photos’ metadata to come through.
I definitely think it is worthy of the LOC to experiment with flickr. I am kind of surprised that they did because in the past it has always seemed to me that the LOC makes their own solutions. It’s interesting just that they partnered with such a commercial entity. flickr, and others, are really providing for a powerful platform for new relationships; this being an example.
I do worry with this hostile take-over bid from Microsoft for Yahoo how it will affect some of these tools, like flickr and even the yahoo search engine and their other ventures. I don’t like Microsoft’s business presence where these social networks are concerned. I use the Office Suite and I do have a Microsoft OS, but I am not a happy customer. This feeling might have developed after having so much exposure to more open source software. But I do know at this point, that I will not buy another Windows machine. My college will because they are bond to Microsoft and Dell, but personally, I won’t.
So, while we have all been asked to sign-up for these services to try them, I can’t help but being concerned how my yahoo ID will become a MS id and how I might go about getting that ID back…. or, how I might delete my FaceBook profile…. I think at some point, some people might feel spread a little thin with all these cross registrations for similar tools. But I know too that it is all part of experimentation.
Personally, I do like flickr– and its alliance with Creative Commons. I think that is the future of collaboration and licensing. I also know, it’s not the only site that does this. So, that trend is really, well, electrifying it has so much savvy and insight and vision behind it.
In terms of the LOC being at flickr, why not? I think it’s great. I mean, supposedly, these things all belong to the US citizenry already. And, I loooooove the FSA/OWI photos. Now, that was a good US experiment.
I hope, though, that if Microsoft does get its way, LOC will pull out.
April 18th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
I have been a long time fan of their photo portion on their online library site. I was so happy when I found out that LOC was doing this on Flickr. I think it is really cool to see these pictures and the fact everyone has access to them is fabulous. I have really enjoyed seeing the tagging and reading the comments on their Flickr page. I think it is great for those who were not fortunate enough to be born during the time period the pictures were taken. The experiment is good press for the LOC and also they may find out more information about their pictures that they never knew by people commenting and tagging.
April 18th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
I think photo sharing is alot of fun–I would like to understand how I might tag portions of a photo and perhaps take people into the catalog for related material.
April 18th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
I love the photosharing concept. It’s fun to think I can put something online and my friends anywhere can see it. When my sister was little she refused to talk on the phone because she said it was stupid to talk to someone you couldn’t see. I know there are phones with that capability now but I think this is even better. You can let people see what you want them to see anytime they want and you don’t have to be available to talk to them! I think this could be a great tool for libraries, the LOC as a great example, but in my Health Sciences Library copyright issues would definitely limit some of the potential for a public version to really work too well.
April 18th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
I agree with Trish. I think that the LC Flickr site has tremendous potential. But, I have to say that I was totally put-off by the comments made on the photos — it was rather like sitting in a movie theater with non-stop irreverent commentary going on beside you. Or like encouraging graffiti.
April 19th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Photosharing can definitely be useful for librarians to give a tour of the library or show the staff at the reference desk, etc. I’m sure there are many uses, but I also put this in the fun category.
I liked the LOC Flickr site; only wish there was a better search mechanism. Perhaps there is and I just haven’t discovered it yet.
April 20th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
I think photosharing is useful for librarians to give a tour of the libraries
April 28th, 2008 at 12:01 am
Photo sharing using Flickr or Facebook can be very important and useful especially for Medical Libraries. We can upload historical digital collection, and hence share them with other libraries.
We can also give a tour of the library and the library recources.
April 29th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
While photo sharing has many benefits, I think the librarian’s role should be to help maintain the order by recommending guidelines for tagging and establishing limits on the length and depth of description for photos. And to get it done while there is still a memory of the who, what, where and when. Since we’ve migrated to digital photos, I am much more likely to put off identifying what’s what in vacation photos which is a shame. As I noted in my blog post completing Week 6’s exercise, without some structure we’ve just transferred the disarray from the physical media to the online world.
Jan’s comment about the comments being like graffiti hones in well on my impressions of a lot of issues about Web 2.0 tools. When I asked my husband’s 16 year old niece to be a friend through Facebook she hadn’t even spelled her last name correctly! No wonder the poor kid was worried about finals!
April 29th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
I recently attended TechEd, a conference I recommend for librarians. There are talks and lots of hands-on seminars. The focus is technology in education, primarily with teaching in community college, but K-12 and library environments are also represented. Web 2.0 is very hot right now!
Well, I took a photo editing course (1 hour). We learned how to use PICASA from Google to fix red eye, and crop pictures, etc. We also can upload the pictures to our Google accounts.
May 4th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
I have begun thinking about posting pictures from our hospital’s archives, but I know that I just can’t do it without permission and legal clearance from the hospital administration. I tried to suggest that some of our interdisciplinary committees use wikis to work, instead of asking me to maintain their intranet web sites, but they are afraid of it. Even if I am willing to adopt these web 2.0 applications at work, it may take some time to get my workplace colleagues to get on board. The organization is always concerned about privacy and legal CYA, which is often at cross-purposes with this very public, shared 2.0 environment.
May 12th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
What do you think about the Library of Congress flickr and social tagging experiment?
The Library of Congress tagging and online picture archive is very important for preservation. I love that they list the status of the pictures as public or not.