Brushing off the Dust and Joining the World

 Libraries. Boring, dusty, places of quite contemplation right? Well, not so much any more. 

The Library of Congress - the world's largest library - have become one of the best users of social media to broaden its reach and to provide greater access to its digital collections. Although these digital collections are available on their website, in January 2008 they set about posting their photos to Flickr. After this pilot project "resoundingly exceeded expectations" the library have since added their videos to YouTube and audio files to iTunes. Here is a brief overview of some initiatives the library has put in place.

YouTube

Currently, these videos span the gamut from some of the earliest movies made through to recordings of contemporary happenings at the library. The project started with more than 70 videos, in April 2009, with a commitment to continuously update content; a commitment they have honoured with over 336 videos available on the channel. Here is a cute wee cartoon from 1921:

Flickr

Uploading the pictorial collections to Flickr was an experiment to "gain a better understanding of how social tagging and community input could benefit both the Library and users of the collections."

Abraham Lincoln, Pres't U.S. (LOC):

Benefits to the Library

Not only does social media allow the library to, in the words of James H. Billington - Librarian of Congress -  "remove many of the impediments to making our unparalleled content more useful to many more people" but it also reduces the work of library staff. For example, the Flickr project has not only allowed users to comment and tag photos in the collection, it has even helped librarians identify the location of travel paintings which staff could not identify.

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Flickr Color Pickr

Just found this great tool - Flickr Color Pickr. It searches public photos on Flickr for a certain colour. What is fantastic about it is if you need a certain coloured image to match the colours in your document, you can find it easily. Squeee.

Web 2.0 Playing

At work, we have had some time set aside for playing with web 2.0 strategies. I went to the first session on Friday. Whilst it is fun to just have a play to see what different things can do - I experimented with avatars and flickr - I couldn't help but feel the blog we were using as a guide, see here, didn't seem to take the power of these strategies into account fully. Whilst it did mention the requirements for using each strategy - such as what systems were needed - so librarians could cater to their patrons needs, the site did not go into how patrons could better harness the power of these strategies for their own requirements.

For example, with flickr, it is a great site for finding source materials. Indeed, I have already used it for my 400-level Advanced Directing paper to provide provocations for rehearsals. I also use it to find creative commons photographs for Critic. With my interests in theatre in mind, it seems like a good website to explore its power for presenting a performance in pictures. Can flickr be used to create such a performance? Or, perhaps, there may be too strong a feeling that performance can still only be done by live, present people.