Archive for the ‘flickr’ Category
Search Flickr by Color
I came across this cool tool from Idée on Circulation this morning. It allows you to search Flickr Creative Commons liscensed photos (or photos from Alamy) by clicking on the color or colors you want the photos to have. You then click on the thumbnail to get the photo and the liscense information.
The only down side is the collage doesn’t list the url of the photos it generates so you can’t really use it as a whole and follow the attribution part of CC.
One more way to use Flickr – videos!
Earlier this month I attended a Mobius conferernce session about vodcasting in libraries. I came back all inspired and fired up. I don’t think our patrons are ready for vodcasting yet but that didn’t stop me from making videos. Even better is was perfect timing for Flickr allowing 90 second videos that are much better quality than YouTube.
Our reference staff has been talking about proactive reference, empowering patrons to use some of the online tools themselves. So I started making videos of how to do some basics and posted them on MRRL’s flickr account. Right now they’re getting a lot of views on Flickr, and we’re getting a wiki set up that is linked from all the OPAC pages so the videos are always available to the patrons from the online catalog
Does your library have a Flickr account yet? What other video topics could you cover for your patrons?
Teaching Patrons about Flickr
The first Online Picture Sharing class was last week and the second is this week, we only have 15 laptops for the patrons to use so we have to have multiple sessions. I choose to focus on Flickr vs one of the many other online picture sharing sites inpart because MRRL has a Flickr account and because of the Social aspects of Flickr.
I’ve started working on the next set of classes, one of them being Online Safety, this is a hard one for me because it’s important to me to teach people to be safe without making them feel like the internet is full of dangers. Any suggestions?
SCOM Videos
MRRL now has a Self Checkout Machine (SCOM) and staff made videos to help patrons understand how to use it. I got a hold of them and put them on both MRRL’s Flickr and Youtube accounts. The flickr video is so much clearer, of course we’re paying for a pro account, but I can’t see why we’d bother with YouTube anymore. Am I missing something? What do you think?
