Thursday evening I met up with several of my Flickr photographer friends for a photo walk. Tracy (Wilhemina Lump Lump), Eric (RestedTraveler), and James (James Wellman) and I gathered at the entrance to Falls Park for a downtown expedition. It turned out to be a great gathering, and we really learned quite a bit from each other about various photographic techniques.

When we first planned this outing we had scheduled it for a couple of weeks ago, right as the snow storm hit. The intent was to go out and try to do some long exposure photography. When we reschedule, we failed to take into account the time change, so we still had more daylight than we had planned. Oops.

(more…)

The number of libraries, museums, and other organizations that are putting their historic photos on Flickr is growing. Add to that number the New York Public Library. As it turns out, these organizations are part of a larger Flickr endeavor called The Commons. This includes the Smithsonian, Library of Congress, Brooklyn Museum, and Eastman House, among others.

But back to the New York Public Library…

The collection is quite diverse. There are some Civil War photographs, photos from Ellis Island, and photos of the dustbowl from the Farm Service Administration. This one collection alone is worth hours of browsing. I hope that NYPL begins geotagging their images, because it would be fascinating to see these placed on a map.

The purpose of The Commons is not only make a public treasure readily available online, but to solicit commentary from the public. The hope is that a wikipedia-like effect will take place and that beneficial comments will outweigh the dreck.

The Commons is the brainchild of George Oates. Unfortunately, Oates was just fired from Yahoo as part of their downsizing. In his blog, Oates discusses the firing, and wonders about the future of the Commons project. I hope that Yahoo does see fit to continue this project.

The happy news is that other groups are seeing the benefit of the Commons concept. Google is making steps in the right direction with its agreement to host the photos in the Life collection. The biggest difference is that Google doesn’t solicit commentary on the photos. I guess one of the reasons is that the photos in the Google collection are much more well-known. These photos also tend to have more restrictions on their use.

Still, I’m glad to see companies like Flickr and Google making these wonderful resources available.

[tags]Flickr, Yahoo, Google, Life Images, Google Images, The Commons, New York Public Library[/tags]

I’ve been tweaking my online presence over the past several weeks.  As I’ve gotten more involved with Facebook, I’ve started pulling in RSS feeds from Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, and most recently RandomConnections so that all of these automatically update on my Facebook profile.  For me it’s a simple matter of laziness.  I’d prefer to type something once, rather than put entries here, re-type them on Facebook, etc., etc.

With all of this automatic cross-posting, the boundaries between traditional websites have really become blurred.   All of the posts that I publish here automatically show up as notes on my Facebook profile.  I’ve gotten several comments on those Facebook notes – more, even than I’ve gotten here lately.  I wonder how many of those commentors are even aware that there is an analogous website, or if Facebook is their only way to view this content.

And this isn’t limited to Facebook.  A long time ago I set up a Tumblr site, and pulled in the feeds from RandomConnections.  I’ve neglected it, but it’s still an exact duplicate of RandomConnections, including the latest content.  The same goes for my account on Virb.com, which also automatically pulls in both the RandomConnections content and my Flickr photos.

I think about my own reading habits.  I use Bloglines to keep track of multiple websites and RSS feeds.  Many of those sites I rarely visit unless I want to leave a comment.  I just read the content on the feed reader.  I’m absolutely sure there are others that do the same for RandomConnections.

This almost almost begs the question of why we need websites at all anymore.  If you’ve got some way to create posts and feed them up through RSS, you’re pretty much set for a multitude of social networks.  Yet there is still some panache to having a cool, easy to remember domain name.  Getting a good one anymore is like buying waterfront property.  I feel fortunate to have gotten the RandomConnections.com domain, and plan to hang onto it as long as I can.

However, more important than having a good domain name is the concept of web branding.  My friends Lauren Cobb, Patrick Greer, Geno Church, and my nephew Chip could tell you more about that.  I personally try to keep a consistent presence across all of the social networking sites I use, with the same icon and RandomConnections username.  The result has been fairly good search engine optimization.  If you do a Google search for a topic with which I’m involved, one of my social network sites will be fairly high in the results.  (I know I could improve this by trying to keep my blog focused, but that’s for a different discussion.)

So, the upshot of this is that I do have a website.  It’s found at www.randomconnections.com (which is blindingly obvious if you happen to be on the site right now), but you don’t necessarily have to go there to read it.  Perhaps Lee Lefever puts it best…

Thanks to a post on the Not Very Bright blog, I’ve just learned that Richland County Library has joined the ranks of those that are starting to use Flickr effectively to post historic images.  The collection contains historical artwork as well as early photographs.  It looks like most of the photos are not in high resolution.  However, they are large enough to be usable online for educational purposes – generally about 800 X 600.

The library has made great efforts to include metadata for each image.  The library has also made extensive use of tags and descriptors.  Not only is there detailed information about each image, but also a link to the item in the library’s catalog.  You can even check out the photo reproduction, if you wish.

Since these are photos of the state capital, they include images of prominent politicians and other famous events.  These should have an appeal for not just Columbia but the entire state.

I really like the way Richland County has done this.  They actually have two Flickr accounts.  The one with the historic images is part of their digitization project.  The second account is for activities and life at the library.  I think this is a marvelous way to keep the historic images and day-to-day library activities separate.  Kudos to the RCPL.

[tags]Flickr, Columbia, Richland Library, Library, historic images[/tags]

This photograph of Nina Simon over at Museum 2.0 pretty much sums up my experience with museum and library websites over the weekend.  This was also the conclusion of Simon’s paper describing museums and libraries in the 21st Century.

This all got started this past weekend as I was reviewing websites for a graduate course I’m taking.  I was not only looking at museums and libraries, but historical societies, as well.  My intent was to see what actual resources were offered on their various websites and to see how they have bought into social networking.  What I found was a bit discouraging. (more…)