Thursday I attended a presentation by Jenny, see the title above. I brought by laptop and blogged a play-by-play of the action, but haven’t posted it because her presentation will be online as soon as she recovers from the nasty bug that seems to be going around the Chicagoland area.
Instead, I think I’ll show a few things I’ve worked on since I saw the presentation. I was familiar with the majority of tools she talked about, had even considered how I might use employ them in the library, but got the spirit to get going only after seeing the presentation. Jenny was very ill throughout the presentation, but inspired the crowd anyways.
-First, here’s the photostream of the Thomas Ford Memorial Library on flickr.
-I also started a flickr group called Public Libraries to encourage more to try flickr. Like Jessamyn mentioned, the Thomas Ford Memorial Library and the Rutland Free Library are flickr friends. Awesome!
-The following picture is the most interesting to come up today.
If you click through to flickr you’ll see that it is a display of new materials and I’ve put two notes on the photos and added links into the catalog. I’m not 100% how this is going to be used, but I like the idea of highlighting certain materials through more than just formatted text, or the image of a book cover. There might be a way to clearly display some book titles through a photograph. It would be fun, and I think a connecting thing.
Since the library website is based on Movable Type, we can use flickr to easily post photos to liven up pages. (When looking at a photo of yours, it is a two click affair to send it to a blog). I think with this, and a redesign of some elements of the page, I can improve the site’s look and perhaps content arrangement.
–Rick and I spent a few minutes talking about the new thomas ford memorial library del.icio.us account, explored the implications of its metadata/tagging and looked at how displaying a del.icio.us rss feed works on a webpage. I finally took the time to play with a few RSS -> HTML (or at least javascript) scripts and was pretty pleased by Feed2JS. I used it to display the links tagged “recipe” on our staff exchange. I figure that sharing recipes might be a good way to get more staff interested in del.icio.us. Here’s what it looks like (in beta):
We also talked about displaying our entire del.icio.us feed as an ‘interesting links’ page. It’s free (as in not work for us) content for our site. RSS -> HTML will be good to use with our flickr feed as well. This code cocktail can provide our library’s site with fresh graphical content.
Besides these applications of social bookmarking tools, I like the idea that the library has a presence on flickr and del.icio.us. At this point I’m not quite sure to what this presence will amount, but it sure would be neat if people started monitoring what we were bookmarking and to teach patrons how.
So is the PL Flickr group only for libraries as entities, rather than employees of PLs who wish to contribute library pics? I noticed it was by invite only, so I thought I’d ask first.
Heya Aaron, your idea of photo’s of books on bookshelves has been worked out at Delicious Library. I am not a MacPerson so i cannot try it, but it may be interesting for you AND your library. Since it uses a laser gun to import books that are on the real shelves. More on:
http://www.delicious-monster.com/
rob, the “photos” in delicious library aren’t really photos; they’re just superimposed images of cd, dvd, or book covers on an image of the shelves.
i have to say it’s good for the type of person who is obsessive about knowing what they have in their personal collection, but i’d argue it doesn’t have much to offer libraries.
Greg,
Yep, it is by invite only because the group is for institutions rather than individuals. Anyone interested in having their library join can contact me.
Good question!