Elizabeth B. Thomsen

CardCow.com sells vintage postcards and collectibles, worth checking out if you’re interested in adding to your library’s postcard collection. But even if you don’t plan to buy anything, this can be a very interesting site, useful for reference and worth sharing with your users. They have a lot of postcards for sale, but even after a card is sold, the image and listing stay on the website as a resource, and they have built up quite an impressive collection of images. You can browse by category, or search the listings. The cataloging isn’t perfect — there are currently eight cards listed for Magnolia and five for Mangolia — but you can usually find what you’re looking for one way or another. They list the date if a card has a postmark, and include images of the backs of the postcards, which is a nice touch.
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Upcoming is a popular site for sharing information about public events. Libraries should consider setting up accounts on this site so they can enter their own event information, and monitor their library’s listing as a venue. If you don’t enter your own events, you may find that someone else posts the information, and it’s always better to have control of your own information.

When you post events Upcoming, your library users can easily add them directly to their calendars with just a click — Upcoming can export directly to the Yahoo, Google and 30Boxes calendar sites, or in Outlook or iCal formats, and there are feeds for every user and every venue. You can also use the wizard to create a badge, or snippet of Javascript to add upcoming event listings to your website or blog automatically. There’s a sample of this at the end of this posting.
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You probably know that Flickr is a site for sharing photographs, and a great resource for finding photographs of nearly anything you can imagine, or a patron could need. But Flickr is also an excellent consumer resource for anyone interested in buying a new digital camera, or in improving their technical skills with the one they own.

Most digital cameras embed your jpg files with EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) data, recording the camera settings such as shutter speed, date and time, focal length, exposure compensation, metering pattern and if a flash was used.
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Zotero is a free Firefox extension that lets you gather citations from a variety of sources, organize and annotate them, and print or export bibliographies in a variety of formats.

It knows how to recognize and extract bibliographic information from many resources, including the NOBLE library catalog, our EBSCO databases, and many other sites including Amazon and the New York Times. When you are on a page with information about a single book, CD, movie, etc., you will see a small icon for that format in the location bar. Click on it, and you’ll save the citation to your Zotero library. If you are on a search results page with a list of books, CDs, etc., you will see a folder in the location bar. Click on this, and you can select which titles to add to your bibliography.
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Here’s a fun little Flickr toy to play around with. You enter a short piece of text, and get it back spelled out in photographs, like this example:

The letters are all photographs that have been posted to the One Letter Flickr group. If you don’t like what you get, try reloading a few times. You can also click on a single letter to see a replacement.
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