My Friend Flickr?

Wk:3 My friend Flickr?
What a very necessary and voluminous resource is Flickr and other photosharing websites. The sheer quantity of images produced today across the globe; some “once in a lifetime” images, ephemeral and eternal, beautiful and banal, in our visually obsessed world , demands that websites such as these should exist. Truly, necessity was the mother of invention. If only to save the lives of millions of trees sacrificed in honour of the humble family snap.

Such websites make photos findable, shareable and safely stored. The hundreds of photos previously printed out at the chemist, that we are told we will risk our lives to save, in the case of fire or flood, will presumably need to be scanned to create a digital image.At our library we do have a great store of local history images accessible on our website, a lot in glorious sepia or black and white. Strangely, I always find colour photos of the local area have a sort of throw away, plastic ,showy feeling about them. Black and white connects more strongly to that atavistic gene within us.

According to Wikipedia, Flickr free accounts which are inactive for 90 consecutive days may be deleted. If this happened in practice the site would probably not suit me, as an occasional photographer at best, or, require me to be a member. Wikipedia also refers to the the Flickr system of setting safety levels to that of a minor. This is understandable for freely viewed images, sort of a G rating, but there are reports of German users staging a revolt over being assigned the user rights of a minor- those sexy Germans! Flickr later amended the German access to “moderate” and the future possibility of age verification procedures in the future. Flickr is still unavailable in some countries like China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran.

The value of digital cameras, I am told is the functionality, the quality of image, the capacity. One can simply delete the poor photo or the regretted image, multi-duplicated shot of the Taj Mahal …and do we need a thousand photos of your new baby, or worse, new puppy? The expectation would be that only the cream of the photographic images would be saved and uploaded to Flickr.

Recently I had cause to collect images of birds for a mural and sought out images of rainbow lorikeets, frequent visitors to my garden, on Flickr. The first image makes a bare tree into a fruit tree of colour. The second image is a lovely shot of rainbow lorikeets which would be more than useful for my purpose...a keeper. Having also looked at Google image, searching for similar pictures,I found that the best pictures were on Flickr. I imagine this is because those on Flickr are shots by enthusiasts.Rainbow lorikeets are such colourful and photogenic birds and easily habituated to come to us with just a bit of regular feeding (leaving aside the value of this). So, it is surprising to see some pictures on Flickr that would not usually be kept by the keen photographer--the birds are blurry spots of colour on top of a distant tree or undistinguisable silhouettes caused by lack of attention to backlighting of the subject,something that would have been attended to when using the older fashioned SLR camera. Surely, these shots required the heavy thumb on the delete button. The seductive capacity of digital cameras can have its drawbacks. I was going to show these shots as a cautionary example but strangely they could not be captured from Flickr.

I suspect that libraries will, if not already, find that Flickr type sites will be indispensable in the future. Your museums ,state libraries,Smithsonians et al(not forgetting your local library local histories) will need the extra storage and back up. Subscribed group photosharing used in conjunction with various interest clubs could also make great use of these sites through their libraries.

blogschmog

I am an older style librarian with a slight greying at the temples. I am able to remember a room full of librarians oohing and aahing at the 60 second response to a command put into a new computer being spruiked to our library by an enthusiastic salesman. Everyone agreed that this was a wonderful thing. Only 60 seconds and it flashed onto the screen in living colour. Albeit, that the graphics were not unlike early Russian animation and the amount of information available to be searched was not much more than would be found in your average calorie counter guide…yes, we all agreed it was a wonderful thing.
No need for card catalogues you say, go on,…gone are each book’s card where previously the patron’s membership number was recorded…unheard of! Later this thing called the Internet, but it wouldn’t catch on, who would use such a thing, who has got a computer at home anyway? Well, things, as they say, change. And, quickly!
So, the Learning 2.0 program is a godsend. I may not have a need for an ipod. I still have little need for a mobile phone. But this does not mean that I do not wish to know what they do or how they fit into the great pantheon of communication technology.
I would not have thought of myself as a blogger but, once started, like most people, I kinda like the sound of my own typing. The idea of putting it out there; what was two minutes ago was only in my head and in two minutes can be seen by millions, is startling, frightening, humbling , omnipotent. So, beam me up Scotty!
Lifelong learning is, one would hope, what everyone does. Librarians tend to have it as a common practice because of our jobs or because of why we got into that job in the first place. In this particular context it is about keeping up to date with new technologies for communicating information, gathering and structuring information, meeting, greeting and bleating, sharing and caring, seeing the future and recording what’s past.
Lifelong learners are commonly the most interesting and vibrant people to meet. Their desire to keep moving forward and not be content with enough is enough is invigorating to themselves and others. Everyone has their story. Everyone’s story has room for more chapters and is refreshed every day (like clicking the green icon on the top of our screens) by the infusion of new ideas, good and bad ,new strategies, crazy and inspired and old truths that we have rediscovered.
Blogs can tell these stories. Some, I have read are very personal. They seem slight. But the best songs are written for the writer, not for a large audience, with the certainty that if it means something to the writer then it will also speak to others.
Blogs that push a political or cultural philosophy can be interesting, inspiring or just plain infuriating. Perhaps most fulfilling are those that share a common interest in things like hobbies,music, art, literature, model collecting or hundreds of other pursuits. I love enthusiasts. Bill Collins tended to gush and cluck about movies a bit too much for my liking but I loved his enthusiasm for his subject.
Blogs could have a relevant and important use in libraries. They could report on new ideas, research, discoveries for those with an interest in subjects like local history, new publications, technological updates or “what’s happening” type of activities like author talks, storytimes and various cultural activities. They would gather in strength as home computer use became more pervasive and an interested client audience was established through word of mouth, emails, interactive discussions and formation of groups with similar interests.