Aaron details more on what he is doing with Flickr at his library. Since part of my job over my last six weeks at the library is to make the web site maintainable by other staff, I’ve been looking for ways of simplifying and streamlining web updating processes. I installed WordPress so even though my library doesn’t have a blog yet — we’re still getting staff on email, everything in due time — they do have a simple web interface for editing and uploading new content. Flickr will automatically crop photos to 75×75, among other sizes, so I built that size image into our home page. Flickr gives people easy URLs for uploaded images and has even simpler ways of showing revolving images on a non-blog site via a badge system they concocted. Did I mention that it’s free for basic users? I don’t own Flickr stock or anything, I’m just always really happy to see clean usable tools that are feature-rich enough for me and yet easy enough to use and understand for my Mom or the folks from work.
Category: ‘puters
a few more neat web tricks with flickr
Two more little Flickr exercises and then I promise I’ll leave it alone: Eric is looking for librarians to send postcards to his son Odin to encourage a love of reading. I sent mine. Also, I installed a “safari theme” for my Firefox browser and am finding it to my liking. How is it like and not like Safari proper? See this little graphic for some point by point comparison.
treat your sick dolls with RFID
A somewhat creepy implementation of RFID technology. thanks fiona
what’s with OPACs lately? an article by Andrew Pace
I have always enjoyed Andrew Pace’s writing and his Technically Speaking column in American Libraries. This month he talks a little bit about the awkward acronym that reflects the awkward systems that are OPACs.
I have not found a patron who is satisfied with any answer as to why a web search engine can return relevant results from four billion full-text websites faster than an OPAC can return a randomly sorted hitlist from one million surrogate records; nor should any patron be satisfied with even a bona fide answer to that question.
just a cite… just a cite… the citeulike
I’ve been helping my law student boyfriend deal with looking at citation/bibliography software that will do Bluebook formatting, so I was primed and interested to see CiteULike which is a tool for maintaining a del.icio.us-like citation database for academic articles that you find online. Haven’t used it yet, looks intriguing in a taggish sort of way. [nothing]