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.