Explore Flickr and learn about this popular image hosting site

What are some ways that you can use Flickr or other photo-sharing site both professionally and personally?

I have been using Flickr for a while now to share personal photos with friends & family. While I can see the advantages professionally for finding & sharing images, plus eg. using for guided tours of libraries - I am much more of a 'textual' person.

What was your favorite Flickr capability - blogging, geotagging, exploring, groups, etc.?Add a geotag to you photo.

I like the integration with other tools such as Facebook & blogs; finding 'friends' is excellent although limited, as they have to sign up to a Yahoo account, as opposed to eg. 'Fotki'; similarly with geotagging - limited to 'Yahoo Maps'.

What group(s) did you join?

CILIP - Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals (UK)
SLA Solo Division

"At Work"

"At Work", originally uploaded by Mark A Perkins.

Test photo for 'SLA 23 Things'

Perspectives on Library 2.0

Blog your thoughts about Library 2.0, Web 2.0 and libraries of the future.

Much of the 'Library 2.0' world seems to be purely an extension of current library services using new tools; new methods of outreach to users, reference question tools, enabling access to collections via new technologies. While much of this does require organisational change within the library, providing staff time & appropriate job descriptions, this again is not new.

Incorporating Web 2.0 into libraries seems to be a much slower process; this is the area where users are not just giving feedback to libraries or access existing collections in new ways - but actually contributing to library collections through Institutional Repositories, Wikis, photo sharing services or adding tags to catalogues.

Web 2.0 does present challenges to libraries in terms of 'Acceptable Use Policies' (AUPs), although these are already often in place for eg. Internet access; perhaps more importantly is the need for scanning & moderation of user input to ensure compliance with AUPs.


How do you plan to incorporate Web 2.0 tools and technologies into your products and services?

Initially by discovering what users are already using & feeding services into that - eg. RSS feeds for new acquisitions, chat facility for ref questions. Then moving slowly moving to eg. Wikis, etc

How do you maintain high quality products and services if anyone can add content to your resources?

2 routes to this; just because anyone can add content does not relieve the responsibility of librarians from their cataloguing, collection development, user guide roles - user tagging is in addition, not a replacement (though very useful for 'see also' entries'. Then there comes the monitoring issue for both AUPs but also to see how user provided content is developing & feeding this into library mainstream where appropriate.

Technorati - further comments

Perhaps I need to come back to Technorati in a few months; currently is flooded with US elections & so difficult to see beyond into 'rising news' & 'rising blog posts' - though the ability to switch between them is excellent. For 'rising news', I am quite happy with my RSS reader for this at the moment.

The ability to filter tag searches via authority is useful, although the language filter seems to indicate a very anglophone bias - perhaps would need to use other blog search tools...such as 'Globe of Blogs' which displays blogs via location (thanks to Yahoo directory for this one)

The 'blog directory' button could be useful when looking into a new domain, as would the 'blog' tab when looking at tag search results - although Yahoo seems to have fuller directory minus the 'authority ranking'.

Blog directories, Folksonomies and Tags, oh my!

What value-add does a tool like Technorati offer your library?

Allows for wider audience for library services, with some 'authority' if others link to library blog.

Does the ability to monitor people's conversations and
the tags people are applying to their content offer additional research
portals for your products and services?

If used carefully ('authority' is a relative term, especially in the sense used by Technorati), then it useful.

How could you incorporate information Technorati offers into the research delivered to your users?

This depends on the research in question. Very valuable, if not essential, for research into how others are viewing an issue or company.

How would you maintain authority and reliability of information pulled from this resource?

As with any other resource, checking the website, checking 'who' (not how many) are positively linking to it, etc.

Delicious - excellent CAS, poor networking

Set up delicious account, added my blogs & some bookmarks.

I'm not so worried about 'portable bookmarks': not only do I keep my Firefox bookmarks saved on a USB stick, but I also would not wish to share all of them for privacy reasons. However, I can see how it would be useful for libraries wishing to share with clients.

I also added certain delicious tags to my RSS newsreader - an excellent current awareness tool.

However, the social networking side is poor as it very difficult to find others user names, there is no 'search by email address/contacts' as for eg. Facebook. The delicious forums state that they are looking into this but they have privacy concerns - this could be solved easily by adding an opt in choice within user profiles...

Further thoughts on blogging

Another issue, besides permissions, is integration with other tools:

Some users prefer (for various reasons) email lists, plus I also use Facebook & Flickr (mainly for friends, family & close colleagues); the question is how to integrate these with a blog....

ScribeFire - excellent Firefox blogging addon

ScribeFire Blog Editor :: Firefox Add-ons

Long Description

ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. You can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, upload images, and post to multiple blogs.

Here is a list of the blogging services that are compatible with ScribeFire: http://www.scribefire.com/help/supported-services/

Thoughts on Blog Choices

I have been following various Blogs for a while, first using 'Blog Navigator', now with RSSOwl. I have setup a test blog for Censorship & Freedom of Information issues (email me if you wish 'guest permission') which should be taken over by another organisation soon, but this is my first public blog.

I decided to concentrate on my interests - copyright, etc & librarianship in General - as can be seen from the Blog Rolls; I have yet to add Websites (no RSS) to my 'Lists' - to come. I also decided that the 3 column layout was not suitable, so changed the template to 4 column; plus I prefer tags in a list rather than cloud for the moment. If things go well, will move over to my own websites with WordPress.

One of the difficult decisions in both the test blog & this was regarding permissions - who can read, post or comment, & related issues of moderation.

I have set up a Delicious account - new to me so will see how it goes...