Elizabeth B. Thomsen

Archive for the ‘Presentations’ Category

For my What’s New with What’s New presentation for the Boston Regional Library System:

Libraries on Flickr

• Beverly Public Library — Historical images, library programs, displays, more
• Lucius Beebe Memorial Library (Wakefield) Sets — Historic images, library programs, book displays, more
• A Book’s Journey at the Newton Free Library
• Lansing (IL) Public Library — Celebrity READ posters
• OWH Library: Phillips Academy, Andover — Teen Read Week Posters
• LibraryFlickrFaves — A collection of some of my favorite library photographs saved as bookmarks on Delicious.com.

Advice for Libraries on Flickr

• Read the Flickr Terms of Service, take the Tour, read the FAQ
• Make sure you understand privacy and copyright settings
• Be creative and have fun
• Capture everyday life at the library as well as the special events
• Step outside for some exterior shots of the building and grounds
• Include weather and seasonal pictures
• Add historic images to Flickr, even if they are also in another system
• Highlight every library service
• Include the whole staff, volunteers, trustees, etc. (but respect the camera-shy!)
• Have a plan and a policy for photo permissions, and respect the right to privacy
• Add information and links to your image descriptions, and use the map and tags to help make your pictures findable
• Add your images to Flickr groups, especially the local and regional groups
• Consider starting groups for the library and/or the community
• Use online toys and tools to enhance and transform your images (add frames, make posters, use special effects, etc.)
• Use Flickr badges to add rotating content to your library sites
• Link from your Flickr pages to your website, and from your library site to Flickr badges
• Keep an eye on your Flickr stats, and report them with other library statistics

Flickr as a Resource

• The Flickr Commons — The Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and several other museums and archives around the world are adding collections of images with no known copyright restrictions to Flickr, where members not only enjoy the images but help catalog them.
• Camera Information on Flickr — Flickr can be an interesting consumer resource. See what cameras Flickr members and using, and see examples of different kinds of pictures taken with each camera.
• Photographs for Your Website from Flickr — How to search for photographs that you can use without permission

Enhance and Extend

• Motivational Posters — Add words and borders to make your own motivational posters
• Palette Generator — Make a color palette from any photograph
• Spell with Flickr — Use Flickr photos to spell out a word or phrase
• Picnik — Easy online image editing
• Tagnautica — Visual search interface of related terms
• Multicolr — Search Flickr by color

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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Here’s the presentation I did at the New England Library Instruction Group (NELIG) and Information Technology Interest Group’s Get to Know Library 2.0 session this morning at Mount Wachusett Community College.

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Open Source for an Open World — Here’s a link to my presentation from the NELA ITS Conference Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Open Source, held at the beautiful Tower Hill Botanical Garden in Boylston.

During my presentation, I demonstrated the song-clapping exercise as an example of the “Curse of Knowledge.” A basic problem in communication is that when you know something, it’s difficult to imagine what it’s like to not know it. In this exercise, one person taps or claps out the rhythm of a song to a partner who tries to identify it. It’s very difficult for most people to guess the song based on just the rhythm, but the surprising part is that if you’re the person doing the tapping, it seems so easy! You can hear the song in your head, and it’s hard to remember that the other person can’t hear it, too, or how useless the series of taps are when separated from the tune.

This was taken from the book Made to Stick : Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath, an interesting, entertaining book that’s great reading for anyone who deals with communication issues…which is all of us.

Songtapper — Try tapping out tunes on your keyboard and see if Songtapper can correctly identify them!