Elizabeth B. Thomsen

Archive for the ‘Flickr’ Category

Teacher Karen Bosch has an interesting post about how her students made their own National Park Trading Cards using the online Trading Card Maker. Looks like a nice project, a good way to teach the kids to gather and organize information into a concise, defined structure. The trading card format makes it easy to use them as flash cards to study and use to test each other, and they could also look good pinned up on a map or bulletin board.

This trading card toy could also work well for library projects. Students, staff or volunteers could make trading cards with photographs of various landmarks and historic places in the community. They could go out and take photographs of each site, or they could search online on Flickr and other sites for photographs. (Be sure to respect the photographers’ copyright and only use photographs with an appropriate license.) These trading cards could be printed out, or used on websites. The trading card at the left is an example of a card using a photograph of a historic house.
[See the Full Size Trading Card | See the Photograph on Flickr]
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The New York Public Library has joined the The Commons, the special Flickr program for libraries and museums, who share their collections on Flickr and encourage members of the community to add comments and tags to help describe the images. The New York sets shared here include photographs of dance legend Ruth St. Denis, production photographs from early cinema, travel photographs from Egypt, Syria, Japan and other places, Civil War photographs, a large selection of Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York photographs from the 1930s, and more.
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The Newton Free Library does a great job with their Flickr account, with lots of interesting photographs. Some show off the art and architecture of the library building, including one of my favorites, this picture of Eeyore from the sculpture Eeyore, Winnie the Pooh and the Hunny Pot, by Nancy Schon, and there are many photographs of library programs and exhibits.

But the thing I admire most about Newton’s use of Flickr is that they don’t just use it for special events, but as a way to visually represent all of the library’s services and activities. This includes many behind-the-scenes pictures of the delivery service, overflowing bookdrops, library staff and volunteers.

A Book’s Journey at the Newton Free Library

One great example of the kind of thing that Newton does so well is this set, which invites you to…

“follow the path of a book at the Newton Free Library – from a personal recommendation or good review, through ordering and processing till it arrives on the shelf for you to check out.”

This is a great example of the “show me, don’t tell me” approach, and something that I’m sure is useful for training new staff and volunteers as well as helping Trustees, Friends and members of the community understand a little more about how the library works.

Flickr just introduced a new, improved version of their slideshow, with many new features including the ability to include video as well as photographs. But the most important new feature is that Flickr slideshows are now easier to share, and can easily be embedded in blogs and webpages, like this:

You can make slideshows from your own photographs, of course — this is a great way to post a set of pictures from a library event on your website. But you can also make slideshows from groups or even search results, and link to them or embed them on your website. Be sure to play around with the options!

There are a lot of third-party tools around that build different kinds of slideshows with Flickr photographs, but there’s nothing easier than using the new, improved slideshow built right into the system!

More on the New Slideshow — From the Flickr Blog

The Boston Public Library is sharing several collections of artistic and historic images to Flickr, including local brewery posters, rare books, manuscripts, postcards, photographs and much more.

Two collections are of particular interest for local interest to NOBLE libraries. The Tichnor Brothers postcards of New England includes over 1,800 Massachusetts images, including many from our area. These postcards are a good source of images of parks, bridges, statues, libraries, churches and other local landmarks.

The Leon Abdalian collection includes historic sites photographed in 1930 during the Massachusetts Tercentenary celebration, when the Boston Daily Record hired Abdalian as the “Photographer of Historic Shrines,” and it includes some sites in our area, including the Balch House in Beverly.

I did a presentation on this topic at the Massachusetts Library Association conference in Falmouth this morning, and posted the PowerPoint on Slideshare:

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