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Priceless Images: Getting Started with Flickr
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Some images are priceless, capturing a moment, a person, or an event in time. One of the most important things we can do with our online presence is to take advantage of the graphical nature of the Web and the interactive nature of many Web 2.0 sites to make a big splash with pictures-images of our libraries, our programs, and ourselves. A cost-effective way to do this (and one that yields some benefits for outreach and interaction) is to use Flickr-that Yahoo!-owned, image-sharing community site you may have heard about recently.
Using Flickr in Libraries
In early August, I spoke at the Northeast Kansas Library System Tech Day. One of the highlights for me was a presentation by Kansas librarians Joshua Neff and Mickey Coalwell on using Flickr in libraries. It was standing room only for their talk about the ins and outs of using this site. Proactively, they stressed that we should be exploring and learning about it, checking out the terms of service and offering user education. At a time when the looming Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) seeks to block library and school access to social sites, Coalwell provided a handout that included this important suggestion for library use:
Educate yourself, your staff, your board of trustees, and governing agencies about social sites, like flickr, and the issues surrounding them. Educate your patrons and your community about the good-and bad-of flickr and other social software sites. Sit down at a library computer with any patron who has a concern, and demonstrate the site to the patron. Let them see the benefits first hand.
It's inspiring stuff. Based on adaptations of things I've written at Tame The Web and from their own explorations, Coalwell and Neff also presented ways to use Flickr in libraries that really utilize the interactive nature of the social Web. Flickr, for example, allows for all sorts of 2.0 goodness: commenting on pictures by registered users, user tagging, photo album "sets" for sharing similar images or photos of events, image groups or pools devoted to all sorts of subjects, and notes that add text or links to pictures. There's also a new feature- a...