Elizabeth B. Thomsen

Yesterday I participated in the Digital Library Conference & Vendor Fair at Holy Cross, an event that celebrated the official launch of the Digital Commonwealth. The Digital Commonwealth is a portal providing access to the digital repositories of libraries and other cultural institutions around the state, soon to include NOBLE. The conference was a great success, with a diverse and enthusiastic group of participants.

The program featured keynote presentations by Mary Minow on copyright and Marshall Keys on the Digital Commonwealth and Library 2.0, and eleven break-out sessions on a various aspects of digital libraries.
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This blog features old photographs of American life, with a special emphasis on the working life. There’s a special emphasis on child labor, especially as shown in the works of Lewis Hine. The site takes its name from Shorpy Higginbotham, a boy who worked in an Alabama coal mine near the turn of the century, and who appears in several of Hine’s photographs.

When I first came across this site a few months ago, I didn’t really get the point. There’s very little information on the source of the images, although it looks like most come from the Library of Congress, and all are in the public domain based on their age. If all of this is readily available with better cataloging and organization on the American Memory site, why bother with this oddly-named blog?

But I’ve come around. The blog’s format is attractive, with a few selected photographs featured every day. Members can set up their own accounts and contribute their own old photographs, and I’ve seen some interesting ones. There’s just enough organization here to invite browsing, and there’s an active community of users commenting on the photographs.

The real reason this site has become so successful is the photographs themselves. They are well-chosen, compelling images, presented in a nice, large format rather than as thumbnails. Who can resist? Libraries could really use this site as a model for ways to use a blog format to present content and invite discussion.

Shorpy: The 100-Year-Old Photoblog — Check it out for yourself

Here’s a quick and easy photo trick that might be a good activity for kids of all ages to try for Halloween (or any other time.)

The Alienator is a cool tool from Dumpr.net that lets you transform any photograph into an alien’s eye view. You can start with a photograph from your PC, your Flickr account, or from another source, choose one of the weird and wild effects, click, and you’re done! You’ll get a permanent link to your photo, or you can save it to your PC, upload it to Flickr, or send it by e-mail.
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Teen Read Week is October 14-20, and this year’s theme is “LOL @ your library.” LOL means Laugh Out Loud, and one way to celebrate is to have your teens make some lolcats.

A lolcat is a photograph of a cat with amusing superimposed text, supposedly spoken by the cat. The text is usually mangled, with the spelling and grammar that one presumes cats, since apparently it’s possible to imagine cats writing in English, but not very well. There’s a definite unofficial style to lolcat images, with the text nearly always being done in a sans serif font, white with a black border.

Photo credit: Spike’s Book Club: The Cat in the Hat by Flickr user greefus groinks

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