Elizabeth B. Thomsen

There’s an interesting article called From the Web to the Workplace in the current issue of the Boston Phoenix about the importance of social media skills in today’s job market. It highlights some of the adult education classes being offered in the Boston area to help people learn how to use blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites to help them in their job search, and to develop skills using social media in the workplace.
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Portrait Gallery a service of the Perry-Castañeda Library, University of Texas at Austin, is a collection of pictures of historical figures scanned from books in the public domain. It’s been around for over a decade, and it continues to be a good place to go when you need a picture of Florence Nightingale or Charles Dickens or Joan of Arc, whether you are helping a library user find an image for a project, or looking for something to add to a page on your website.

These are images scanned from books in the public domain, so the images here are all pretty old, and the quality varies depending on the original book source. You won’t find a picture of Martin Luther King, Jr. or Albert Einstein here, and the picture of Winston Churchill shows him as a young man — it’s World War I Churchill, not World War II Churchill. But for pre-20th century artists, authors, composers, explorers, scientists and statesman, it definitely a useful source.

And because these images are all public domain, you can do whatever you want with them — print them out and use them on posters or for craft projects, resize or crop them, colorize them, add text them, or combine them into an artful collage.

They are also fun to play around with using various online editing sites. Go to Big Huge Labs to make a Pop Art Poster or a set of trading cards or a magazine cover. Or go to Picnik where you can add all sorts of special effects, as I did to Marie Antoinette.

The design of this site is simple, elegant and easy to use. The collection is small but useful, and it’s definitely a site worth bookmarking and sharing.

Does your library use Flickr as a way to share their photographs with the public? If so, you probably link to your library’s Flickr photostream and you may be using Flickr badges and individual photos on your blogs and website that link back to Flickr.

But how findable are your library pictures to someone searching on Flickr?

To test this, log out of Flickr, go to their main page (http://www.flickr.com) and try searching for your library. Try all the different ways people are likely to search. For example, if you’re the Smithers Library in Goodtown, Massachusetts, try these searches, and see if you find your library’s pictures on the first page of the search results :

• smithers library goodtown
• goodtown mass public library
• library goodtown ma
• smithers library massachusetts

Academic libraries should do the same thing, trying different combinations of their library and school names.

If your photographs aren’t coming to the top of the search results, check their titles, descriptions and tags. The more information that you add, the more findable your pictures will be. Titles, descriptions and tags are all searched, but tags are the most important.

Be sure that you are using the name of your library as a tag: “Goodtown Public Library”. (Put quotes around a phrase so it gets indexed as a single tag.) Adding the library name as a tag is important even though your Flickr account is probably in the name of the library, because the user name is not included in the regular index and is not found except in a People search.

You should also add the name of your community or school, and consider redundant tagging for state names: Massachusetts, Mass and Ma, for example — people may use any of these forms as search terms. In addition to the tags that you add to every picture, be sure to add other relevant tags to individual pictures, for example : puppets, crafts, Halloween, as well as the names of speakers and performers.

It’s also a good idea to add your library photographs to the Flickr map. You’ll find the Add to your map link on the right, in the Additional Information area. Just click on this, enter the address to find the location where the photograph was taken, and save the location.

Titles, descriptions, tags, map — these are the keys to making your pictures findable on Flickr. If you want to improve yours, you don’t need to edit them one at a time. Go to Organizr, select a batch of photos (or even all of them) and you can add tags to the group and add them all to the map at once.

It’s definitely worth making the effort to make sure your photographs are easy to find on Flick. After all, helping people find stuff is what we do best!

If you were designing a postage stamp for your library, what would it look like? What about historic buildings and other notable places within your community, wouldn’t it be fun to see them featured on postage stamps?

The United States Postal Service does allow you to put your photographs on real postage stamps through their Picture It Postage plan.

But it’s more fun and a lot cheaper just to play around with the idea of designing your own local postage stamps. There’s a free online tool called Framer that makes it easy to create stamp images from your photographs, complete with postmark. It can connect to your Flickr or Facebook account to get your pictures, or you can upload them from your computer.

This might be a fun photo-craft project for children or teens (anyone, really!) These faux stamps could be used as graphics for your library blog or website, or printed out and used as part of a display — could work with a travel display, or one on stamp collecting or perhaps on the lost art of letter-writing.

Historic images, like this one from the New York Public Library’s collection on Flickr, also work well for this. Be sure to change the date for the postmark for these!

Have fun! Framer has many other styles and options, and it’s part of a great collection called fd’s Flickr Toys.

The NCES Kids’ Zone website has a simple but powerful tool called Create A Graph that makes it easy to create makes several different kinds of graphs and charts, with lots of options for effects, colors and file formats including PDF, JPG, SVG and more. There are several samples here to play around with so that you can see how different the same data looks presented in different formats. You enter your data in a simple web form, choose a design, preview, save and download. You don’t need to register to use the site, and if you bookmark or e-mail yourself a link to your graph, you can come back and edit it any time within the next 30 days.

As part of Kids’ Zone, this tool is aimed at students, but it’s a handy tool for anyone who needs to make a chart or graph with a small set of data. (If only it could import delimited data from Excel and other sources!)

Create A Graph

Create A Graph Screenshot

Sample Pie Chart

Sample Graph

Update from TechCrunch: SearchMe May Go Offline Tomorrow (Updated: Offline Now) — “The company needs a new round of financing or a quick acquisition to stay online, but so far neither are happening…Bottom line, The site may go offline at least temporarily tomorrow if a buyer does not step in (Update: The site now redirects to Google)” — July 24, 2009

[I have edited this post to remove embedded content from SearchMe, but I am leaving the link and screenshot, and hoping that SearchMe will be back soon, one way or another! ]

SearchMe is a search engine known for its elegant visual display of search results. I have written about it here before [August 5, 2008] and I often include it in presentations — the visual display looks glorious projected on the big screen. I was a little concerned to hear they were doing a redesign, but it’s only taken me a couple of visits and a little fiddling around to feel comfortable on the new version.

The default results display is still a flowing series of page images, by default displayed as in a ribbon format [see screenshot below.]

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