I like this video of someone rocking out at a public PC at a library even more because I have no idea what the comments are saying. [lisnews]
new eyes on old organizations
I always try to read at least a few library student blogs, because I think having a new set of eyes on some of the things we’ve been doing for years is often useful. Graham Lavender just went to an IFLA conference and I found that his experiences mirror my own feelings about my first national ALA conference. Librarians: friendly, love to dance. Really.
I had the opportunity to sit in on a meeting of the Conference of Directors of National Libraries, where the head librarians from over 50 countries sat around a table and each had a tiny little flag at their seat, which is exactly what I imagine the UN must be like. Afterwards, some of them stayed behind to have a glass of wine with the students (there were seven of us, one from each library school in Canada), and it was all very casual and friendly.
library cartoon
RIP MáirÃn O’Byrne, Dublin city librarian
I am a sucker for these sweet obituaries of librarians. MáirÃn O’Byrne not only beefed up the libraries in Dublin city and county, she was very professionally active and provided home and hearth to many members of her family who were also involved in good works. We should all be so lucky to be so fondly remembered. [thanks eoin]
Flickr Commons project – one organization’s report
I wrote a little bit about the Flickr Commons project in an article for Computers in Libraries magazine. You may have seen it mentioned here and elsewhere in library blogland because two prominent libraries, the Library of Congress and Bibliothèque de Toulouse have put collections there. I’m most fond of the Smithsonian’s collection though I pretty much love all of them and love seeing No Known Copyright Restrictions next to all those images. So yay, I love Flickr.
However, a question many people ask is: is this project working to do anything other than give librarians fancy 2.0 tools to use? In a recent lengthy post by another participating cultural heritage organization, The Powerhouse Museum, they explain what the project has done for them. I’ve pulled out a few quotes. [thanks peacay!]
In the first 4 weeks of the Commons we had more views of the photos than the same photos in the entirety of last year on our own website. It wasn’t as if we made the images on our own website all that hard to find – they were well indexed on our own site by Google, they were made available to the national federated image search/repository Picture Australia, and they also existed in our OPAC. Still, that was no match for Flickr.
Whilst some of the information we are learning about the images this way could probably have been discovered by the Museum itself, that the public has been able to do this for us and often within hours of new images going up on to the site speaks volumes… This is also very much about empowering and acknowledging the importance of ‘amateur’ knowledge, which in the networked environment can often outpace, and sometimes outperform, isolated ‘professional’ knowledge.
Tags are easy and we’re treating them just like our other community generated metadata. Now we’ve passed the 3 month mark we’ve pulled all the tags to date back into our own collection database online where they will soon appear alongside the tags that have been on our own site.