Flickr user Waffle Whiffer has uploaded oodles of fun printed matter from the 1960s through the 1980s, mostly cereal and fast food coupons and ephemera.
Flickr user Waffle Whiffer has uploaded oodles of fun printed matter from the 1960s through the 1980s, mostly cereal and fast food coupons and ephemera.
The Official White House Photostream on Flickr is essentially Cute Overload for US Politics. There is a type of unabashed sincerity in the Obama administration that I’ve never seen before.
I really love this photo of the President interacting with a young visitor.
And then, of course, there is Bo, shown here visiting the Oval office for the first time. Awww. Hi Bo! Hi!
February is "I love libraries" month. Of course for me, every month is "I love libraries month," but I'm happy to have a special occasion to celebrate the wonderful work that school and public libraries do throughout the country.
This photo from Lester Public Library in Two Rivers, Wisconsin (courtesy of Flickr) is called "Taking a Break at the Library." First of all, how wonderful is it that they have stuffed animals for kids to love on at this library, but secondly it's a terrific image pairing books and stuffed animals - kids get the message that they can love both.
Most book lovers have never met a library or a bookstore they didn't like. As the economic downturn has accelerated in these last few months, circulation and visitation of local public libraries is at an all-time high. Folks are turning to their local libraries for entertainment as well as access to information on job opportunities and skill development. Ironically, during these boom days in public libraries, funding for public libraries is close to an all-time low.
Here is a fab site that provides lots of ideas as to how we can all support our community libraries. And here is the "I Love Libraries" site supported by the American Library Association. Both sites have a wealth of information about books, authors, illustrators, bloggers, and libraries.
The Library of Congress has finished a report (full report and shorter summary in pdf) summing up what they’ve learned after the first nine months of their experimentation with Flickr. Here is an excerpt from the summary. Look at these numbers.
The following statistics attest to the popularity and impact of the pilot. As of October 23, 2008, there have been:
- 10.4 million views of the photos on Flickr.
- 79% of the 4,615 photos have been made a “favorite” (i.e., are incorporated into personal Flickr collections).
- More than 15,000 Flickr members have chosen to make the Library of Congress a “contact,” creating a photostream of Library images on their own accounts.
- 7,166 comments were left on 2,873 photos by 2,562 unique Flickr accounts.
- 67,176 tags were added by 2,518 unique Flickr accounts.
- 4,548 of the 4,615 photos have at least one community-provided tag.
- Less than 25 instances of user-generated content were removed as inappropriate.
- More than 500 Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) records have been enhanced with new information provided by the Flickr Community.
Between January and May 2008, the Library saw an increase in hits at its own Web site. For Bain images placed on Flickr, views/downloads rose approximately 60% for the period January-May 2008, compared to the same time period in 2007. Views/downloads of FSA/OWI image files placed on Flickr rose approximately 13%. Average monthly visits to all PPOC Web pages rose 20% over the five-month period of January-May 2008, compared to the same period in 2007. For additional information, see the Outcomes section in the full report.
Not only is that data good news about the project but being able to say “Hey when the Library of Congress opened up their photos to commenting and tagging, they only had to remove 25 inappropriate tags/comments out of 75K instances of user-generated content” thats a big deal.
Christian Lindemann, from Hannover, Germany. This piece is one of his more sophisticated pieces. There’s more on his site: www.lindedesign.de
Hey all! Just a quick note...
For more Sugar Frosted inspiration, be sure to check out the SFG Flickr Group site as well. There is some awesome work being shared there, another great resource for creatives.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/sugarfrostedgoodness/pool/
Enjoy!
Will Kane says:
I saw your post on Lizette Greco on ‘Drawn’ today and thought you’d be interested in this:
Louise Evans’ [aka Felt Mistress] fabulous plush toys based on her partner Jonathan Edwards’ illustrations.
Interested? More like enamored! These are brilliant, and I absolutely love her attention to the details from Jonathan’s drawings.
A Flickr set of book covers for Penguin’s Great Ideas series of books. Pictured above: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
via Kottke
Uploaded on June 5, 2008 by Crafty Dogma
Oh, I am so excited about Videos on Flickr. Not that YouTube doesn't cut the mustard, but I've had trouble uploading a few things to YouTube.
Plus I do prefer Flickr's more visually pleasing, clean interface. (90 seconds or less...this is microcontent at it's finest!)
Just got this in my inbox this morning and figured I’d share. I edited a little bit and added some hyperlinks, also suggested that BPL needs an announcement blog along the lines of the nifty one at NYPL Labs.
Hi Jessamyn and Alison,
Thanks for blogging about our Flickr presence last week… your influence was greatly felt (to the tune of 2,500 hits on the day of your post, with virtually no other publicity at all).
I wanted to let you know about a couple of this week’s developments:
If you feel like any of this is newsworthy enough to treat your readers to a followup, we can always use a little pre-launch publicity. :-) Either way, I’ll be sure to keep you both posted as the project continues to grow.
Thanks!
Michael
–
Michael B. Klein
Digital Initiatives Technology Librarian
Today's Flickr Slide Show (Thanks to Theresa Lynn)
For some reason, writing the talk about tech support in libraries has been making me think about libraries on social networks again. Maybe it’s the little push of friends I get on Facebook after I give a talk to a new group of people. Maybe it’s because I had to explain yet again that I think it’s worth powering through bad design and usability in order to have presence in a place where your users are or might be. Maybe it’s because social software seems like a free and easy way to give your library a human face on the larger Internet. Maybe it’s because after being at SXSW I just see social software as the default way to be on the web and so libraries that are moving forward with blogging and other web tools may as well expand into using social tools as well. This has nothing to do with 2.0 anything, although I guess you could see it that way.
So, to that end, I’m making a small list of ways that I think libraries and librarians can use thse tools to further the existing missions of their institutions. It’s nothing new, but I’ve been pondering it lately and I think specifics, and links to examples can he helpful. Feel free to add more in the comments.
The reason I think it’s important to show good examples and best paractices is because we’re still dealing with libraries like Mishawaka Library which thinks that blocking social software sites in their library because they can’t manage unruly teens is some sort of solution to a problem. I’m not saying there aren’t problems surrounding public computer and internet use in libraries generally, maybe there are even sometimes problems with teens, but really responding to the problem by blocking wide swaths of the Internet is not really going to help anyone understand the problem better. It just makes libraries look hostile and librarians look reactive. I’m sure there’s a larger post here about dealing with teens + comptuers + internet + understaffing + the fear factor of unknown online socializing, but I feel that it’s all of our responsbility as online community members of various stripes, to provide positive examples of social software online. This is mine.
I love the Dezeen design magazine website. Every day, you get glimpses into some stunning architectural and design ideas for the future. Many of them seem like something out of science fiction, while some are in production right now. Above:
San Francisco architects IwamotoScott (it’s an all-flash site, but worth it) have won a competition to propose a futuristic vision of their city, organised by the History Channel. Hydro-Net proposes a new, underground network of tunnels for hydrogen-powered, hovering vehicles plus a forest of new towers sprouting from lowland areas inundated by rising sea levels.
Check out the full set of images on IwamotoScott’s Flickr page.
[via Dezeen]
Oh facebook, it's so delicously beautiful and so richly addictive. You can post pictures & artwork, music, videos, email your friends and get updates on what everyone else is posting quicker than you could ever have dreamed possible (i mean, how else are you going to keep up with your ex-boyfriends sister-in-laws holiday in Spain?). And who actually reads a websites terms of use before posting artwork or music they spent hours creating? I mean, isn't it all the same anyway?
Well, after a concerned friend passed along this note "I'm not sure exactly what the deal is with facebook and imagery.. but I've heard that they own the images once you post them... eeek! You, especially, might want to check that out if you already haven't."
This, of course, must be a rumor. Why would such a reputable company put something so ridiculous in their terms of use policy (you know, that thing you have to check off every time you upload a photo on facebook, or import a blog, or link your flickr photo's to your facebook profile...)?
But then... I did some digging. I found exactly what I was looking for, plain as day, in the top of a large section of text called "Proprietary Rights in Site Content; Limited License" And it didn't look good...(Facebooks Terms of Use)
"All content on the Site and available through the Service, including designs, text, graphics, pictures, video, information, applications, software, music, sound and other files, and their selection and arrangement (the "Site Content"), are the proprietary property of the Company, its users or its licensors with all rights reserved."
"By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content."
"In plain English, this means you’re giving up copyright control of your material. If you upload a photo to Facebook, they can sell copies of it without paying you a cent. If you write lengthy notes (or import your blog posts!), Facebook can turn them into a book, sell a million copies, and pay you nothing."
"With respect to photos, graphics, audio or video you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service other than Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available. This license exists only for as long as you elect to continue to include such Content on the Service and will terminate at the time you remove or Yahoo! removes such Content from the Service."
http://art-words-life.blogspot.com/2008/01/picture-is-worth-thousand-words-or.html
I got into a funny conversation with a friend of mine at the MIT Puzzle hunt this weekend (my team came in third out of 37!) about finding images of things. There’s a lot of data collection in puzzling and a lot of times when you have to do is, say, look at a photo and figure out what it is or where it’s from. This is great of someone recognizes it, not so great if someone doesn’t. Every puzzler has their own personal sites they use for this. I tend to use Google images because it’s fast and I can move through it quickly. Others use Wikipedia. My friend was saying he uses the Commons site. At first I thought he meant the Creative Commons search which I don’t fiund super-useful and told him so. He actually meant the Wikimedia Commons which is a great place to find freely licensed images.
Now Flickr has launched their Commons site which does a few things.
These beautiful, historic pictures from the Library represent materials for which the Library is not the intellectual property owner. Flickr is working with the Library of Congress to provide an appropriate statement for these materials. It’s called “no known copyright restrictions.”
Hopefully, this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions would pick up, to share and redistribute the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world.
So, they’re taking a risk, they’re sharing their data, they’re presuming good faith, and they’re going to try this out. Close readers may also note the small text on this page “Any Flickr member is able to add tags or comment on these collections. If you’re a dork about it, shame on you. This is for the good of humanity, dude!!” Which, loosely translated means they’re starting out trusting people and trying to maintain a light tone about it.
So, the original photos are still held by the Library of Congress and Flickr has no “ownership” of them as a result of this partnership. They’re available worldwide [well except Dubai and other places that block Flickr entirely] and they’re in a system that allows for user-generated content additions to the content. I’m pleased that the LoC, or someone at the LoC decided to step up and really demonstrate how trust and openness can help further the mission of culutral institutions. Now if I could only get LoC to friend me….
For someone who went through library school just a couple years ago, I'm feeling very late to the party - or maybe just extremely forgetful. Somehow I missed that for the past 10 or so years the Library of Congress has offered digital images from its collection through its Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, with a collection of over a million images.
And now, through a cooperative effort with Flickr, called The Commons, LOC is improving access to thousands of those images (so far) through Flickr's interface and public tagging capability.
This is very cool stuff. More people will appreciate these visual documents of our nation's history, and the images will get more thorough cataloging through tagging (though possibly also more erroneous, or extraneous - I hope LOC's Flickr moderator will weed out the dumb ones occasionally). Moreover, all the images have "no known copyright restrictions", which means they can be freely shared and remixed - even more freely than a Creative Commons license allows. Just please still remember to attribute the source!
Recently, Michel Le Querrec friended me on Flickr. I’m not sure why, maybe to extend the reach of the project he’s working on using the site, Photos Normandie. Apparently the National Archives of Canada (and the U.S.?) are uploading pictures from the Battle of Normandy, more than 2700 of them to date.
I found the photographs fascinating, even though the captions and descriptions are in French, so I friended the site back, and now every day I see a few of these amazing pictures mixed into my photostream. It’s very strange to see thumbnails of dogs, nature, friends, children, libraries, and then the Battle of Normandy, but I find it an interesting use of Flickr and the images usually force me to reflect on how lucky I am in this day and age. For some, it would be interesting to add in streams from Iraq, Kenya, and other places that would bring home the reality of the rest of the world, especially in a classroom setting.
All of which was broiling in the back of my mind when I saw this incredible announcement from the Library of Congress, an institution I have to say I never thought would take this step.
My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven
“If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata (one of those Web 2.0 buzzwords that 90 percent of our readers could probably explain better than me).
The project is beginning somewhat modestly, but we hope to learn a lot from it. Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos from two of our most popular collections are being made available on our new Flickr page, to include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist.
The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.
We’re also very excited that, as part of this pilot, Flickr has created a new publication model for publicly held photographic collections called “The Commons.” Flickr hopes—as do we—that the project will eventually capture the imagination and involvement of other public institutions, as well.
From the Library’s perspective, this pilot project is a statement about the power of the Web and user communities to help people better acquire information, knowledge and—most importantly—wisdom. One of our goals, frankly, is to learn as much as we can about that power simply through the process of making constructive use of it.” [Library of Congress Blog]
More info is available here, here, and here. Major kudos to LOC for seeing the opportunity and seizing it. Hopefully the community will respond and help tag the images for retrieval, but it will be an interesting experiment either way. I am very impressed with this effort and can’t wait to watch it grow.
archives images, battle of normandy, flickr, history, library of congress, loc, photographs, photosnormandie, pictures
The Library of Congress is on Flickr! I am charmed by their profile. “Yes. We really are THE Library of Congress.”
If you're scanning in your feedreader, click over to the Web page. I added a poll feature and a slideshow element on the left. Enjoy! (And take the poll...)
In New England, in Autumn, there is a lot that is beautiful. Here is a neat article about small town libraries in Western MA with an attractive slide show to go along with it. I’ve made a Flickr set of the libraries I’ve been to with one photo per library. They’re not all small town libraries, but they’re good for looking at as well. [thanks rob!]
The Official White House Photostream on Flickr is essentially Cute Overload for US Politics. There is a type of unabashed sincerity in the Obama administration that I’ve never seen before.
I really love this photo of the President interacting with a young visitor.
And then, of course, there is Bo, shown here visiting the Oval office for the first time. Awww. Hi Bo! Hi!
listing of grievances: Two stupid girls have a hair-tearing fight on the bus Liquid and curly fries fly everywhere The guy in front of me puts up his arm, so I do too The fighting high school girls roll out the door as it stops I continue listening to my podcast, because, meh, stupid girls People start coughing and opening [...]
oday I Skimmed Schmaltz, and was Rawked at by a Raven.
Raven with Sausages by quinet
The schmaltz came from a mess of chicken soup I made. A thick layer of chicken fat rose to the top overnight and was skimmed off and used to season the cat’s breakfast.
Chicken soup for the soul by tsheko
The raven is a Common Raven, who was hanging out in one of the San Francisco parks that I walk through on my way to work. Common Ravens are more common out here than they are back east.
They are about the size of a small dog, and live shoulder to shoulder with their smaller corvid friends the Crow and the Western Scrub Jay. All three species enjoy Rawking, poking at things with their substantial bills, and Making Trouble.
What alliterative things happened to YOU today?