Thing 3: Photo Sharing - Socrates Sculpture Park

Earlier today on this very blog I griped about people overloading me with links to their personal photographs.  Well, here I am doing the very thing I complained about.  Polly is a menace encouraging us to use these tools!

This past February my children and my husband had the same week off, which is unusual.  We looked at tickets to all kinds of warm places - Miami, New Orleans, Birmingham, Biloxi, San Diego, Phoenix, San Antonio.  All proved to be too dear for our wallets.  So we grudgingly settled on going to New York City.  Again.  What new things could we find to do in New York City?  (OK, stupid question, I know.)  We ended up having one of our best trips ever.  Among the many great new things we found on that trip was the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens.  This park, run by City of New York Parks & Recreation, is especially interested in promoting the work of emerging artists and in encouraging the interaction of visitors with the art work.

Here is what the site looked like before the park:

Photo Courtesy of Socrates Sculpture Park Web Site

And here it is in 2011:


 I want to go back and visit in the warmer weather.  It looks like they have all kinds of programs, including a sauerkraut making workshop(?).

It is taking forever for my photos to upload into Blogger.  Is anyone else finding that to be the case?  I am also having trouble moving the photos around in the blog posting.  I have never been good at using a mouse, so it could be me.  In any case, I will let you view the rest of the photos of the park at my Flickr page.

Thing 3: Photo-sharing - Crandall Public Library's Folklife Center

Poster from Current Exhibition

Photographs of CDLC are pretty boring - a bunch of desks, computers and file cabinets.  Lucky for me, I took a trip to Crandall Public Library in Glens Falls the week that we got this assignment.  I was there for a workshop on security for archival facilities, which I will blog about later if time allows.  For now, I will focus on the library's Folklife Center.  The Center is a wonderful place that many people in the Capital Region have never heard of.  Its mission is to "research and present the cultural traditions of the upper Hudson valley and southern Adirondacks of upstate New York."  Besides a research collection of both archival and 3-dimensional objects, the Center has changing exhibits and many performances throughout the year.

Check out more photos on my Flickr stream (taken with approval of Center staff) and then go see them in person!  Besides the Folklife Center, Glens Falls is also home to the Hyde Collection (which has photo streams and YouTube videos on their web site), a couple of good book stores - Red Fox Books and The Dog Ate My Homework being my favorites, and some excellent restaurants.  I finally got to try The Chocolate Mill on my most recent visit.  Definitely more than enough to make a trip up the Northway worthwhile!

Thing 3: Photo Sharing

Before today I had never used a photo-sharing tool for my own photos because I rarely take any.  When I actually do take photos, I print out those few that I like at my local CVS.  Maybe I have fewer friends and family than most people, but I never thought that anyone other than those depicted or, possibly, grandparents would be interested in my photographs.

I have used Flickr to view photographs, and I like the ability to comment on other people's photos, but I find the interface to be unattractive.  Most people have way more photos up there than I really want to look at, so I look at a few and then move on to other things.  Now that I've played with the search feature on Flickr, maybe I will spend a little more time looking at photos.  For the search feature to work, however, the photos must be titled or tagged in some way, and a lot of people I know who use Flickr for personal use just throw a bunch of photographs up there with no metadata.  Maybe I'm a curmudgeon, but I really don't feel like flipping through hundreds of very similar photos of Cousin Betsy's wedding to find the few good ones or those of people I know.

I am interested in some of the widgets and tools Polly posted in her message.  It looks like you can do lots of cool things with a Flickr photo stream on a web site with these tools.  I haven't had a chance to explore them yet.  There are so many ways staff can make library web sites more attractive and exciting.  The question for me is always how much payback does there need to be to be worth the effort.  Tinkering with these tools is a lot of fun, but when you look at the clock, more time has always gone by than you realize.  (Or maybe I'm just especially slow on the uptake.)  Putting a few photos from events on your web site is quick and easy.  It could be even better and look more professional if you use on of these widgets or play with the placement, but maybe a link to the Flickr stream is enough.

I liked the example of the READ posters of library patrons.  I would like to get my public library to do that.  It would generate a lot of interest and maybe even some money.  The library that took family portraits and put them in their Flickr stream reminded me of some great speakers I heard at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference last spring.  The speakers, Ray Nichols and Jill Cypher, were in the middle of creating a letterpress book on the history of Newark, Delaware.  The focus of the book was the past, but they wanted to tie it in with contemporary Newark.  They opened their studios for several days and invited residents to come and have their photos taken.  They had everyone show up from firefighters, to breakdancers, to town officials, to families young and old.  They ran strips of these photos horizontally across the middle of every page of their book.  They call it the "citizen band."  It may sound weird to have a band of contemporary photos going across every page of a history book, but it looks great and makes the book very dynamic.  Check out some examples on their company's blog.  Unfortunately, it looks like some of the close-up photos have been removed from the blog, but you can still get a very good idea of what it looks like.  Maybe libraries could use this idea in some way.

Update:  I contacted Lead Graffiti, the company that created the excellent book on Newark, Delaware.  They have fixed their blog so you can now get a better sense of all the wonderful photographs that make up the "citizen band" in their book.

Metadata Games

Earlier this month, I attended the New England Archivists conference in Providence, Rhode Island.  I attended a fascinating session there that was worth the price of admission for the whole conference.  The session was called, "Playing with Metadata:  Developing an Open Source Metadata Games System for Archives and Libraries."  The speakers were Mary Flanagan, Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College; and Peter Carini, College Archivist at Dartmouth.  With help from grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, they are experimenting with ways to get one of the most daunting digitization tasks - creating metadata - to be done for us for free by outsiders.  How do they propose doing this?  By creating fun (and possibly addicting) computer games where the ultimate goal is to create good metadata!

The testing of these games is in the very early stages.  They are still experimenting with issues like how to determine by an algorithm whether a term is accurate or not.  They want the computer to do as much evaluation of terms as possible because if staff people have to spend a lot of time reviewing terms, then it defeats the purpose of the games.  They have toyed with the idea of giving more weight to a term the more times it is suggested by players.  But then what about cases where a player might have specialized knowledge? For example, the College used photographs from a Polar Expedition collection for the initial test.  An Artic Studies student ended up being one of the testers, and he used terms such as umiak (a type of boat) when playing the game.  This specific term is even more accurate than "boat," or "kayak," but it is unlikely that a large number of game players drawn from the general public would come up with this term.  The project staff is working on a way to deal with this issue by getting the games to give points to players for obscure but meaningful words.

Like many of our libraries and archives, the Dartmouth Archives holds tens of thousands of historical photographs.  At the current staffing level, which is unlikely to change dramatically in the near future, it would take the Dartmouth staff generations to create metadata for all the images.  And that's assuming no new additions to the collection.  In instances where the staff has created metadata, the metadata is often vague or generic due to the heavy workload.  Terms like "campus" to describe images taken on the Dartmouth campus are not uncommon.  This lack of detailed metadata hinders access to these wonderful collections.  Material may be digitized and put online, but few people may actually find it without good metadata.

Even on campuses like Dartmouth, populated by high-achieving and erudite students, computer games are very popular.  Besides playing lots of computer games in their free time, students can register for courses like "Game Design Studio."  Once the faculty and staff thought of matching up archivists' pressing need for better metadata to improve access to digitized material with the public's obsession with computer games, it seemed like the perfect marriage.  If Dartmouth is successful with this endeavor, they are dedicated to providing these tools to archives throughout the country through Open Source Software.

For more information on this exciting project, including a chance to participate in further trials, visit the tiltfactor web site.  Tiltfactor is involved in several other game projects.  The archives-related project is called "Metadata Games."

Thing 2: RSS & Google Reader

I haven't used RSS for a long time, mainly because there are few blogs that I care enough about to check regularly.  Those blogs and bloggers that I am interested in usually post links to their new blog entries on Facebook.  I can usually tell from the first couple of lines that appear on a Facebook post whether or not I want to click on the link and read more.

Google Reader is easier to use than I remember it being.  Maybe I'm just more used to it now.  Or maybe I was actually using another tool before - it's been so long.  I have put several blogs on my Google Reader page.  I think it will be useful for keeping up to date with those blogs that have relatively infrequent posts.  I can check them all out in one place, and I will not forget about them. 

I have also added an active Albany Times-Union blog to my reader, but I'm thinking I might remove it.  Blogs that have several posts and comments every day are hard to keep track of anyway, and it might just clutter up my reader page, unlike the blogs with more substantial comments.  Also, newspaper blogs tend to attract more than their share of annoying and rude commenters, so I may, in the end, prefer to visit the page when I'm in the mood, rather than have it staring me in the face when I open my reader.

Something that I have noticed that I didn't expect is that blog updates are recorded more quickly on my iGoogle page than on my Google Reader page.  I have put two of the blogs I follow on both tools, and in each case the iGoogle page was updated a full day earlier than the Google Reader page.

Thing 2: RSS Feeds & iGoogle

The best thing about reserving my "CDLC Learns" assignment for Fridays, is that I can really learn from all my classmates that have struggled with the assignment before me.  After perusing the RSS sites this week, I really thought I was going to adopt Netvibes.  I had never heard of it before, so I thought it would be good to try something new.    Rose the Blogger has a lot of positive comments about Netvibes, and I really like the way the feed page for the CDLC Learns participant blogs looks when it is created using Netvibes - clean, concise, and all the recent posts neatly laid out.

But then I read many blog posts from people who were experimenting with Netvibes.  People were having a lot of trouble and many said things weren't working consistently.  When our fearless leader, Polly Farrington, discovered that Netvibes isn't consistently finding and updating information, and couldn't figure out why, I decided it was time to throw in the towel for the time being. 

I moved to iGoogle.  What fun!  Why had I never heard of this cool tool before??  I use gmail and Google all the time, but I had no idea iGoogle existed.  When I set up my page, I checked off that I like cooking, and before I could get started in customizing my page, I had so many mouth-watering recipes staring me in the face that it was hard to move along.  But move along I did, and soon had several useful gadgets and blogs up on my page.  My favorite is the "Birthday Reminder."  You put in loved ones birthdays, and it will list upcoming birthdays on your iGoogle home page.  I knew something like this existed on the big, wide Internet, and finding it was something I kept telling myself I had to do after missing family birthday after family birthday.  Thanks, Polly, for allowing me to finally sit down and find it as a class assignment.

I discovered that there is not one, not two, not even three, but FOUR Yo Mama jokes gadgets!  I guess the tradition of telling these jokes during school bus rides is universal.  I have one of the gadgets minimized on my iGoogle page so I can supply my kids with these ocassionally.  They will think I am so cool. 

I am toying with the idea of introducing this tool to my kids and Scouts.  It is very fun, extremely easy to use, and eye-catching.  They could learn a lot about feeds, blogs and organizing information.  There are lots of useful and educational gadgets, such as math games, SAT vocabulary flash cards, and Spanish word of the day.  Would these be the things they would really use, though?  Or, more likely, would they gravitate towards things like Super Mario Game of the Day and jokes of the day gadgets.  Then they would find out where I am getting my Yo Mama jokes from!  On second thought, this is one tool I am keeping to myself.

Blogger Comments Vagaries

During those rare times at home when I am not pondering library questions, I read several blogs that use Blogger, and I sometimes attempt to comment.  One of my most frequently visited blogs is Romantoes, written by an old college friend who now teaches English at West Virginia University.  (Oh, I am so proud of myself.  I figured out how to create that hyperlink without any help!)  The March 3, 2011 entry on Romantoes introduces readers to Phyllis Greene, now deceased, who began blogging at age 90.  What an inspiration to all of us!

Anyway. . .  when I comment on these blogs, I have varying levels of success.  Sometimes it lets me post right away; sometimes I have to sign into my gmail acount (I usually use my gmail account as my "identity"); sometimes I have to type in the word verification, sometimes not; and sometimes my darn comment just sits there in the comment box and won't go anywhere or - the worst - disappears altogether.  My kids play a lot of computer games, create their own blogs and web sites, and download who-knows-what, including malware, that has to be scrubbed from my computer.   Therefore, I figured these problems were related to my home computer.

Today, however, I have commented on several CDLC Learners' blogs within a short time span, and I have noticed the same phenomenon with my office computer.  Has anyone else experienced this?  Any ideas on why it is happening?

Thing 1: Blogging

I am both the Documentary Heritage Program Regional Archivist & the Digital Project Manager for CDLC.  "Digital Project Manager" sounds like I am sooooo conversant in technology, but that's not true.  I pick up what I need to get by to deal with the task at hand, but I don't necessarily understand the bigger technological universe.  I am looking forward to this opportunity to explore various tools without the time pressure to figure out a solution right now, by-the-seat-of-my-pants, because it just has to get done to complete a work task.  Having the permission to explore some of these tools simply for the sake of exploring them will lead to a greater understanding of them.  (Thanks to my boss, Jean, for encouraging this on work time!)

Besides my paid jobs, I am also a Girl Scout leader to 7th graders and the brand new (and very green) president of the PTA at my daughter's middle school.  I am hoping that this course will also help me better serve in those positions.  My Scouts gravitate towards badges that involve communications - they have already earned the Public Relations and Audiovisual Production badges - and this course may provide me with tools that will help me better direct their explorations in this area.  With the PTA, we are always looking for additional ways to reach parents, teachers, and parents at our feeder elementary schools, and I anticipate that course will give me lots of ideas.

By the way, if there are any other Teen Girl Scout leaders out there, let me know whether you have had any luck with Journeys.  I think I am doing something wrong.  My girls find them tedious, but they need to finish one if they want to earn the higher awards.