Citegeist

Two more photo posts at TechSource

// June 7th, 2010 // No Comments » // Libraries, Photography

Stay on top of the chaos:

In sitting down to write Part 5 of this series, “Turning Images into Objects,” I realized I’d gotten ahead of myself. If you’ve beenkeeping up with this series, you’ll know that we’ve covered photography basics, what the modes on your camera mean, and ideas for using your camera creatively in the library. Before we can think about prints, greeting cards, business cards, stickers and other interesting and practical things that you can make from photos, you have to get them off the camera and onto the web. Simple, right? Well…. It can be, if you plan ahead a bit. Here are some tips that may help. Read More…

Flickr extras:

I use Flickr all the time personally, and my library has two accounts, a general library account and a University Archives account. Flickr has been around for a few years now, and librarians all over the world use it to share images from their personal and professional lives. Flickr is more than a great place to post and share photos with your community; it’s a community in itself, and a starting place for all sorts of activities. Read More…

We are nothing without each other

// May 1st, 2010 // No Comments » // Libraries, Photography

Book Titles
Originally uploaded by London Public Library

I’ve been working today on a TechSource post about creative ways to use a digital camera in a library and have been wowed and awed by all the great programming that is being documented by libraries on flickr. There’s the usual–storytime, gaming events, Meet-the-Authors. My favorite so far is an event held by the London, Ontario Public Library: “Human Book.” Community members from all walks of life volunteered to spend a few hours at the library posing as “human books,” meeting with interested “readers” and telling their life stories. Regardless of how many books we circulate, articles we download, what matters most (IMNSHO) is the impact that we have on each other. Fabulously done, London PL.

2007 – a year in first lines and first photos

// December 19th, 2007 // No Comments » // Photography, Random, Web Stuff

Yes. Another meme. I can’t help myself. Kathryn did it. Walt did it. My turn to reminisce over 2007 by sharing the first sentence of the first post from each month, as inspired by CW at Ruminations. Some sentences are from my paper journal (remember those?), where blog posts just weren’t funny, appropriate, or, well, there. I’m going to put my own twist on it, though, and also share the first photo uploaded to flickr for each month.

January – I feel sure I’ve written these words in some journal, somewhere far away, long ago.

February – I am sitting in yet another airport, Ontario this time, waiting to depart for Atlanta for the Electronic Resources & Libraries 2007 Conference.

March – It was a little, self-conscious “hee hee” of a giggle, conspicuous in its joylessness.

April – A is watching Little Einsteins, B is jumping on her bed, and K is asleep.

May – My first impressions of EKU were that the staff are lively, enthusiastic, friendly and creative.

June – I attended the SAALCK Directors’ Council meeting today in Louisville with Betina.

July – Today marks the first day of the Learning 2.0 @ EKU Libraries program.

August – I’m sitting in a Harvard building waiting for the first session of the Academic Library Leadership Institute to begin.

September – A friend told me that John McDonald accepted the offer for my old position; he starts at Claremont on 8/22, almost five months to the day after I left.

October – I’m sitting in the Tates Creek Country Club; B just went back for her dance class.

November – Jason found the work diary I’d kept in 2004 and brought it to the Charleston conference: a nice trip down memory lane, even if it was the hardest year in Claremont.

December – This is really pretty cool.

(Ok, I cheated on this one, but the first photo I posted was of a mite! ugh! Isn’t this one better?)

Upon reflection, this has been a very challenging and rewarding year, having changed jobs, moved across the country, met new friends… and all the rest.

I hope that everyone has a rewarding 2008.

Learning 2.0: My Things

// December 14th, 2007 // No Comments » // Libraries, Web Stuff

Week 2: Social Networking and Facebook
Week 3: Photos and Images
Week 4: RSS and Newsreaders
Week 5: Play Week
Week 6: Tagging, Folksonomies and Technorati
Week 7: Wikis
Week 8: Online Applications & Tools
Week 9: Podcasts, Video and Downloadable Audio
Week 10: Play week 2: Mashups

Yay, I’m done!

Learning 2.0: web-based applications

// December 7th, 2007 // 2 Comments » // Libraries, Web Stuff

In this Learning 2.0 “thing,” we were asked to look at the UCD Library 2 Go blog, which highlights online applications. The “Customize your homepage” entry caught my eye. I recently experimented with NetVibes to collate my social networking “stuff” into one page. I abandoned it pretty quickly, as the tab for meebo had to be over on its own instead of a column on my NetVibes page:

I would love to trade out that flickr section for a small version of my meebo buddy list and movable chat windows–a mini version of the meebo page–but that’s not the way it works, apparently. Too bad.

Another recent online application I’ve used is Picnik. It’s an online image editor that allows you to make changes (like crop, exposure, contrast…) to images that you’ve stored on flickr, Facebook, Photobucket and more. The free set of tools would be sort of limited for someone used to using Photoshop, but for quick fixes, it’s great, and if you’re interested in more flexibility, a premium upgrade is only $24.95 per year.

Trying to get to Charleston

// August 21st, 2007 // 2 Comments » // Conferences, Libraries

Day 106 – I am a librarian
Originally uploaded by cindiann

I submitted this as my entry for the Rachel K. Schenk Memorial Scholarship supporting first-time librarian attendance at the excellent Charleston Conference. I also plan to apply for the CAS scholarship, but that one will be harder to write–so many technologies to choose from! Just to clarify, applicants for the Schenk Scholarship are to write a short essay about their love of books.

“My love of books”

Yes, I am one of those people who wrote on her library school application about how important libraries had been in her childhood. I had been working in my university’s library for a couple of years without realizing that it held a vocation for me; I was embarrassed and underwhelmed by my urge to write about spending time in the library and with books but thought that must be what the library school admissions persons wanted to hear.

Much has changed in the 15 years since I entered the MLS program at the University of Kentucky. Libraries are no longer mere repositories of knowledge, bastions of scholarship, hallowed halls of yellowing paper and foxing leather. They are still physical nodes of knowledge, but now serve to connect any user to the wider, limitless world of networked information, connecting us to other libraries, other users, other books, journals, databases, images, videos and sounds; and are often social centers, technology hubs, and finally, the hearts of their campuses and communities.

Even though I am immersed daily in the investigation, application and evaluation of technologies in libraries, I find that what gives me satisfaction at the end of a day is a good, solid book. I still indulge in pleasure reading—lest I go insane from reading too much professional literature, too many blogs—and find that a meaty fantasy like Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind is just the thing I need to knock the weight of saving the academic library world out of my brain.

In the online community of Flickr, where I interact frequently with so many like-minded librarians, I find that an image is still worth at least a thousand words. With that in mind, I offer this self-portrait to illustrate that I do indeed love books.

More flickr fun: mashups and whatnot

// August 1st, 2007 // 4 Comments » // Libraries, Photography, Web Stuff

For Learning 2.0 week 3 (which was last week!)

Perhaps I’m just feeling cynical because today is my birthday and I have begun the inexorable downhill slide to 40, but most flickr mashups just don’t give me the warm fuzzies. Some of them are pretty entertaining, like FlickrSudoku, Spell with Flickr, and the Color Pickr, but most of the hundreds listed on the Flickr Mashups page I have a hard time finding a use for.

To me, the most useful flickr mashup sites are still the classics–the ones written by John “Flagrant Disregard” Watson. He is one of those hard-to-find tech-geek guys who are great writers with a lot of heart. This comes through in his blog, his flickr stream, and in the care with which he creates his “flickr toys.” The ones I use again and again are the Mosaic Maker, Scout, and Flickr DNA, but I have also used the Badge Maker, the Magazine Cover generator, the Motivational Poster generator, the Hockneyizer (mine), Captioner, Billboard maker, and the Profile Widget. I also notice he has a lolcat generator!

New (to me) Flickr mashups I tried out for this assignment:

Stained Glass Collage
Originally uploaded by cindiann

Yawn. I think that photographers who don’t use as tight a crop as I typically do might find this useful. I don’t. Perhaps I just chose poorly. I don’t really consider this a mashup, because it’s only possible to create collages of your own photos, that you have to upload to the stainedglasscollage website. If I could enter a tag and have it create a collage from the most interesting (Creative Commons-licensed, of course!) photos matching that tag, this would be more, useful to me. C-

My Flickrgraph
Originally uploaded by cindiann

So. This is a graph from flickrgraph showing me, a few of my friends and several friends-of-friends. OK. What now? It never loads the buddy icons in place of those gray smileys, and it seems to choose which contacts to display completely at random, choosing to ignore the contacts I hold most dear (i.e., friends). Perhaps it can’t see that information? Bah humbug. B+

I also looked into the Flickr in SecondLife “mashup,” which allows one to display flickr images based on a tag or user name that you feed to an object in SecondLife, but I couldn’t figure it out, and I’m not going to hang out in SL for the creator to log in so I can ask him about it.

Painting the Sky

// July 26th, 2007 // 1 Comment » // Libraries, Photography, Web Stuff

Painting the Sky
Originally uploaded by Stuck in Customs

A relatively new thing in digital photography is HDR shots–high dynamic range. A photographer takes 3 shots of the same scene using a tripod. One is underexposed, one overexposed and one just right. Then a piece of software is used to meld all three shots together, creating a rich and surreal image that is different than what humans see with the naked eye.

There are several flickr groups dedicated to HDR images, and they often are interesting enough to make the Explore pages.

This entry is my first flickr lesson in the Learning 2.0 program @ my library.

Learning 2.0 week 3: flickr fun!

// July 25th, 2007 // No Comments » // Libraries, Photography, Web Stuff

I knew this week was going to be really fun for me, since I’ve been a fairly heavy flickr user for a couple of years now. I’ll start by applying the 6C’s from Michael Porter’s Keep Up! workshop to flickr:

Concepts: “…like chapters to a story, each concept ties together with others and contributes to something larger than itself.”

This one is not as obvious as one might think. Flickr is, of course, primarily a photo-sharing web site. The major concept: take a photo, upload it to flickr for sharing. Other basic concepts in flickr include:

• contacts – add people whose work you admire as a “contact.” Add people you know as “friends” and people you love as “family.”
• photo privacy settings – a concentric circle model of privacy, where each photo can be viewed only by you, by family, friends and family or the world.
• groups – any flickr user can create a group around a theme. Groups can have discussion threads, rules for participation, a pool of photos and members and administrators.
• tags – ever tried to search for a photo on your computer? DSCF93748.jpg doesn’t mean anything to anyone. Add descriptive tags to your photos so that you can find them later, and so that others can find them, as well.
• APIs – flickr allows software developers to interact with its content using an Application Program Interface; this in turn means creation of web sites that use flickr photos for various purposes–flickr mashups.
• licensing – each photo can have varying degrees of copyright or Creative Commons licensing. Photos licensed under Creative Commons can be reused, with some caveats (see API!).

Convergence: when technology concepts, tools and best practices come together and combine into new tools and services.

Web site with unlimited storage + enthusiastic and talented users + fabulous and beautiful images + rich feature set + Creative Commons licenses = unlimited potential for visual goodness.

Community – the sense of community is what really sets sites like flickr apart from “regular” websites.

I began using flickr as a way to share photos I had taken at U2 concerts. Other fans that I respected had started a flickr group; it was a great way to keep up with the 2005 tour and to find out which shows people were planning to attend. Flickr quickly became a way to share photos of my kids with my far-flung family and friends. But flickr is so much more than the sum of its parts: through flickr, I have “met” fellow U2 fans, librarians, bloggers, Southern California photographers and am able to keep in touch with a former college roommate and former colleagues and am now keeping up with a new set of colleagues I met at ALA. Flickr has (literally) connected me a lot of people in different zones of my life. (um, see “Convergence”!)

Content – “the overlap of the Cs inevitably lead to the creation of content”

This one is easy–the best content on flickr is the beautiful and moving photos that people post by the millions. But there is a lot of other content on flickr that is also incredibly useful. Many users (including myself) upload screenshots of things that they find interesting or from slides that they created in presentations. I have used other people’s Creative-Commons-licensed screen shots in other presentations–saves me some time! Discussion threads inside groups also constitute useful content. A great example of this is the Photoshop Support Group. Discussion threads created by group members contain photos that the photographers aren’t quite happy with. Other group members then download the photos and try their own Photoshop tricks to soup them up a bit.

Collaboration – Users work together to make flickr the great site that it is

Image sites that are basically silos of individual users’ photos–even if they have comments and other interactive features–simply fall short of flickr due to their lack of truly collaborative tools. Creative Commons licensing can give other artists permission to create “derivative”‘ works–take someone’s photo and make it better. But users collaborate to make flickr a content- and community-rich place.

Collection of tools

Contacts + comments + groups + blog this + Creative Commons + fd’s flickr toys = endless things to do on flickr!

Now, on to my lessons for flickr week.

First the need, then the tool

// June 27th, 2007 // 3 Comments » // Libraries, Library Systems, Web Stuff

In his post “My ALA Baggage,” John Blyberg says:

There is a fairly severe disconnect between what the 2.0 pundits say (among whom I count myself), and what is really happening. Your library may have, for instance, a Flickr account, IM reference, a bloglines blog, delicious bookmarks, whatever. But are they truly embedded into the way your institution works? In almost every case, this approach seems like throwing seeds into the air, letting them land where they may. I think it’s time to start talking about how we arrange these components into a more suitable constellation of services. These technical elements of L2 must be aligned along our institutions’ field of influence and expertise so that the seams don’t show. Seams send the wrong message, they say we’re being disingenuous and sloppy. In effect, poorly implemented technology amounts to spamming our users and staff with “new features.”

Yes, yes, yes! I think that librarians are still struggling to see how 2.0 technologies can be worked into the tapestry of services that they currently offer. First and foremost, this is an education issue. Thinking “We need a wiki!” is fundamentally a different thought than “We need a tool with which our electronic resources librarians can build an ERMS, because the ‘electronic file cabinet’ approach is not working and we cannot afford Verde or 360,” or “we have many events and no good way to publicize and receive feedback about them.” I suppose this is where Blyberg’s technologists come in (of whom, he intones, there are very few in libraries)–in this scenario, the technologist would hear the need for a home-grown ERMS and think that perhaps a wiki would suffice until money comes flowing in. If librarians made a point of learning about web 2.0 technologies, some of the leaps required to get from need to tool (even experimental tool) could be made without having a technologist on board.

I’m very pleased that our library is doing Learning 2.0. In fact, I’m so jazzed about this, I can’t even tell you. The librarians that work in my organization are ripe for this kind of training, and I expect that once they follow the lessons and learn about the real life applications of blogs, wikis, flickr, tags, podcasts and all the other great stuff we’ll be covering, that they will be better equipped to see not how we can be “EKU Libraries 2.0″ but how we can transform our services to include interactive content that takes advantage of web 2.0 tools.