Elizabeth B. Thomsen

If your library is a member of Flickr, consider taking pictures of all your displays and posting them. It’s an easy way to get a record of what you’ve done, and these are nice content to share with other libraries. Be sure to use the title, description and comments to give some information about the display, and if there’s a related booklist, blog posting or webpage, you can add a link to the description. It’s often difficult to read the signs and text, so it’s especially helpful if you transcribe them in the description.
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Journalism and librarianship are twin professions in many ways. Both professions share the goal of providing people with information, and both deal with issues of intellectual freedom, objectivity and accuracy. And we’re both always trying to anticipate the interests and needs of our readers. We look at trends, events in the news, local situations, seasonal changes, everything, and wonder, “What will this mean to our readers? What will they want to know more about?”

Poynter Online is a journalism site, but there’s much here of interest to librarians. I particularly like the Al’s Morning Meeting column by Al Tompkins. It’s a collection of reports of news stories, trends and events that journalists can use as ideas for local feature articles, and librarians can use as ideas for collection development, book displays, blog postings, pathfinders, newsletter articles, training sessions, etc.
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There’s nothing like some well-chosen photographs to add visual interest to your website, and, thanks to Flickr, you have an almost limitless assortment to choose from. If you need pictures of blooming flowers for a gardening booklist, or of the Pyramids for a pathfinder on Ancient Egypt, or of dogs and cats for an announcement of the library pet show, or nearly anything else you can think of, you’re likely to find exactly what you need on Flickr. You can even find pictures of your own community, and sometimes your own library on Flickr!
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The Motivator, one of many fun and useful tools available from fd’s flickr toys, makes it easy to create digital versions of those motivational posters with the black borders and inspiring words.

The example posted here is one of a series of posters made for National Library Week by students at the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library of Phillips Academy Andover working with Sara Ciaburri, Instructional Librarian. You could also use this for many other purposes, of course. It’s so fast and easy to use, it would be fun to show kids and teens and have them come up with their own ideas.
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Last night at the Computers in Libraries conference, the first annual InfoTubey Awards were presented, honoring outstanding library promotional videos posted on YouTube. YouTube has given libraries a new, low-cost, high-impact method of outreach, and it’s great to see Information Today, the publishers of Computers in Libraries and sponsorts of the conference, honor libraries who are using this new medium.

It was interesting watching the winning videos in a crowd of librarians, and hearing the acceptance speeches. The videos don’t look like typical professional productions made for TV. They are were all made using basic videocameras, and edited by inhouse using free or inexpensive software, and they fit the YouTube environment perfectly : quick to make and easy to share. Creativity, authenticity and sincerity count more than slick production values. Most of the winners talked about how much local attention and appreciation their YouTube videos were getting, and how much fun all of this was for both staff and patrons.
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