Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian … were approached by flickr to add collections into the flickr commons.

Michelle Springer, LOC

Have to have no known copyright restrictions

22 libraries, archives, and universities have joined so far…

flickr mentions new sites on their blog, which has a LOT of reach

Shelley Bernstein, Brooklyn Museum:

They started adding stuff into flickr … they were flooded with comments

Posted an unidentified photo in paris – archives people would update the description… because of their workload and tiny staff, they couldn’t do this very speedily – they almost left the commons!

Once the community formed around the commons, this changed. One flickr user puts notes around all the buildings on each photo, marking them with names

It’s a great way to work with the community

Community is helping their workload:
- they had some coding feed problems
- she wrote to their community group
- the community scripted a solution for them – nice.

Michelle up again:

They have “history detectives” who figure out names of people and places … and support this with citations and links to the info on the web.

Personal experience adds info – giving examples of community naming things in the photos

Interesting discussion of image titles – they used the original titles, one popular pic is titled “negro boy” – they’ve had their community discussing how the title was part of the times, preserving the language they used when the photo was taken, etc

Lots of then and now photos

Joshua Greenberg, NYPL:

Can’t be a project of the “Digital Group” – needs to be the librarians with expertise

When they posted pics, they hadn’t resolved the issues of who answers the questions from the comments …

His team had been figuring out how to do this technically …

Martin Kalfatovic, Smithsonian Institution Libraries:

Showing their quirky photos – old photos of “white men with mustaches,” micro photos of tiny fish, etc – they had an internal discussion of whether or not people would be interested in these photos. And they were

what did they learn from a social project like this?

Easy – gather a small group of like-minded people, launch the project

Hey – just me, testing out the embed part of the new flickr video option. The what??? If you haven’t heard – flickr now allows video uploads for pro members (translation – those who have paid $30 a year for a flickr pro account).

The limitations? Not overly produced (I think the idea is to upload those videos people take with their phones); 90 seconds max in length (you can do a lot in that time frame); and only certain video formats are allowed – if you’re interested, you can read more about the specifics here.

This is interesting – the photos actually change once in awhile (I chose random interestingness for the photo background).

Some of you will get a kick out of this. I just got a mention on Rocketboom, a techie, newsie videoblog (an extremely popular one, too).

Remember those Blogging Delivered billboards I posted about a day or two ago? The Rocketboom folks also found them interesting – and included one of my pics in their January 10 videoblog! They linked to my flickr account, too.

My wife just chuckled, and accused me of blogging about a videoblog that blogged about my flickr feed blogging billboards… that I blogged about… (ahem – sorry – just a little giddy with squeamish videoblogging delight).

Kansas City Public Library will re-open our Plaza Branch library this weekend! We’re pretty excited. The story in a nutshell? We knocked down the old building, and built the new building on the same spot. We get the basement and the ground floor, and various corporations lease the upper floors.

Technology? We got it! About 50 PCs, all wireless, for the public. And anyone can walk in to the library with his/her laptop or handheld and sync up to our wireless network. How cool is that?

Go to my flickr page to see all the pictures (plus some of the Central Library’s cool parking garage, too). Hope you enjoy the pics!

Checkout this flickr collection: Upload Video. It’s a tutorial on uploading video to the Internet Archive, etc… but the cool thing is this: the tutorial is saved on flickr!

It looks like someone turned powerpoint slides/other graphic files into jpgs, and posted them in order in his flickr account – saved as a colleciton. From there, you can view the collection as a slideshow.

Try it out – what a great and unique way to use flickr!