Thing 3: Photo Sharing

I was going to create a new Flickr account for Thing 3, but, surprise! I had associated the email I wanted to use with the Yahoo! account I used for for my existing Flickr account. This wasn't necessarily bad, since I had forgotten which password I had used for that Yahoo! account, and I had to go through the password recovery.

Lesson learned: I have way too many email accounts, and I used different passwords for most of them. (Way too many means, basically, more than I remember having.)

So I've already got a Flickr account, and I apparently made it, judging by what's up there, to post pictures from the Tulip Festival a couple years ago. They're even already neatly in a set. For this, I'm uploading a handful of display pictures from the past few years; I was digging in the garden all weekend, and I really don't feel up to wandering around with a camera right now.


Hm... Test 1 (posting with the Flickr Blogger "Share This") did not do what I wanted it to - it just posts straight to the blog. I want to put all the pictures I want to share straight into the post. Normally I just use Blogger's upload straight from my computer (which puts them all over at Picasa Web, organized nicely by which blog I uploaded it to). Test 2 (using the URL from Flickr with Blogger's upload) didn't work, either. So I can post pictures from Flickr to the blog, just not quite how I want to.

Well, then! Maybe I can link it with the URL? Yep, that worked. Still, not what I want to do!

Blogger upload-from-hard drive to the rescue, then. Here's the full set over on Flickr. And here are the pictures:


This is, as the labels hopefully make clear, our circulation desk. It will be here through sometime in May, when our area gets hit by the renovations. (I would love to keep a 6-foot section for workspace and storage in my office, but I don't know if they'll let me.) I actually took this picture for a workshop PowerPoint for interlibrary loan, as a visual for "Go here to pick up your books!"


Our wonderful reference and instruction librarian worked with faculty across campus for an interdisciplinary faerie display. (I wish I had pictures of the display cases - the chemistry faeries were awesome.) The leaf was a patio accessory donated by one of the clerks, and I worked out the fishing line arrangement to hang it from the clothesline that runs around the railing on the second floor. It took a couple of us to actually get it up there.


"Faces of Cobleskill" was the homecoming display in 2009. The concept wasn't mine - our cataloging/acquisitions librarian did the homecoming displays for a long time, but got bogged down in projects that fall, so I picked up the wall display part of it. I think it was the most looked-at display I've assembled. The pictures on the wall were culled from yearbooks (scanned, cropped, printed, glue-sticked). The mirror on the far right made every observer one of the "Faces of Cobleskill."


Doing 2009's homecoming display landed me 2010's. I didn't want it to be nearly as labor intensive, so I took 8 yearbook pictures, culled from the decades since the yearbook started, and sent them up to the print shop on campus to have display-case-sized copies made. Older yearbooks, I learned, have a lot more full-page pictures that lend themselves to enlargement. (There's one more wall display case, on the far right, with a mortarboard on a rotating pedestal - representing the graduating class for that year.)


This was the museum case display that went with the 2010 homecoming display. I take it back - this was my most looked at display item - because it was a huge version of the campus map, and people used it heavily for directions. The map was left over from my "Need a map?" display, which highlighted services on campus, and I repurposed it by adding the years buildings were constructed. (We're in our charter's centennial year as a college.)


Banned Books Week! This was another of my ideas that was better in concept than in execution - the most recent 100 most challenged books, on little book outlines; the ones we own are in the upper half, and included call numbers. Making each little book in Publisher, printing, cropping, and assembling took too long for the purpose.


One of the display cases for New York's Quadricentennial. Not being from New York, but having a history M.A., this was a fun project. The most interesting thing to me was how close Samuel de Champlain and Henry Hudson got to each other's explorations in 1609, albeit six or eight weeks apart. (The display is organized chronologically, starting when Hudson leaves Europe.)


This is the other half of the New York's Quadricentennial display. It's practically impossible to find a model of the Half Moon (I even called the State Museum's gift shop, and they said they hadn't been able to find any to sell), so I had to settle for a photograph of the replica rounding the tip of Manhattan.


Flickr's menus and tools don't feel as intuitive to me as most of the other web 2.0 tools we've tried out thus far. Picasa Web isn't really any better, unless I want to add my photos to my "Google Profile" (no, thanks). Most of my personal photo sharing nowadays I do through Facebook, which hits everyone I really want to share them with except my mother and grandma. (Do you hear that, Mom? If you get back on Facebook, you can see my garden pictures without having to ask me to email them!)

If I need to link to a picture somewhere besides a blog (for which I'll just use the Blogger upload), I usually upload it to one of my domains and link it from there. I actually didn't get a Flickr account for a long time because I was just using that. The limitation on free uploads per month is the main reason I didn't continue using Flickr; I think it used to be much less than 300 mb, because the last time I used it, I uploaded 20 pictures and hit the monthly limit.

Flickr, with its tags and public options and searchability, is a great place to post any pictures a library would want to use for publicity. It's well-established and has a huge userbase. I would need to use it regularly to be comfortable enough with the interface not to be reading through all the menus trying to find the option I'm looking for, though.