WebJunction

You may have heard of Flickr [http://www.flickr.com], especially in the wake of it's recent acquisition by Yahoo!, or alternately through the magazine articles and blog posts about how Flickr is part of the new folksonomy movement (or, as I affectionately call it, "taxonomies gone wild"), or even just from users speaking the general praises of Flickr's undeniable coolness.

All of the above are reasons for libraries to pay attention to Flickr. The most important features to remember, however, is that people love to use Flickr because a) it's easy to use, and b) it's fun. With press bits referring to Flickr as "A toy for bloggers" (Forbes 10 January 005), and "The Friendster of Photo Sites" (Salon.com 20 December 2004), the language all points to a user-friendly, effective, and fun application that has a bright future on the web.

But enough hype, what's this service really all about? Flickr, "almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world" according to the About Flickr page, presents the two main goals like so:

1. We want to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them. ...
2. We want to enable new ways of organizing photos.

Yes, Flickr is empowering users to create their own digital collection of items, using their own cataloging and metadata systems, and then allowing them to easily share their collections with friends, family, and the rest of the world. No need for crazy librarian moon language indexes, subject headings, or taxonomies, or even fabulously sensible Art & Architecture Thesaurus terms. Just plain people building fancy visual collections, through user perspectives using a simple, fun tool. How does this magic work, why do users love it so much, and how can libraries get hip to the Flickr trend?

While I could wax poetic about the minutia of every feature of Flickr, the best way to get the details on how the service works is to peruse it's helpful documentation, which is an easy and very entertaining read. Be sure to take a look at:

• The quick Flickr tour
• "How To Get The Most Out of Flickr"
• The Flickr FAQ (also includes links to the forums and helpful offsite links)

Goal 1: "Flickr is the WD-40 that makes it easy to get photos from one person to another in whatever way they want."

Flickr encourages you to take photos by any means necessary - camera phone, digital camera, PDA camera hook up - and use their vast array of upload tools to get down with your bad uploading self.

A basic, beginner-friendly form lets you upload up to six photos at a time, can be accessed by clicking on the easy to find Upload link at the top of every page.

Even fancier and techier tools include the ability to upload photos via a specially assigned email address, where the subject line becomes the title of your photo, and the message text becomes the description of your photo, which makes sending photos from a computer, a camera phone, or an Internet-connected PDA a snap. Users with the newfangled Nokia phones and a Lifeblog (Nokia's content management service that takes all of the text and video content of your phone and pops it into a "timeline" blog for you) can easily cross-post photos from your Lifeblog to your Flickr account. I foresee Flickr continuing to make as many upload tools as necessary to cover as many options as possible, in keeping with the WD-40 goal.

Once the photos are uploaded, you'll notice that information about what camera was used and what date it was taken is lifted from the camera, and added to the photo page for you (Flickr also keeps track of when your photos were uploaded) for you. Photos go up with the file name as the title, but changing the title and description is as easy as clicking on the title, or in the description area, typing, and clicking Save. Changing the orientation of a photo is as easy as pressing a button to make the photo rotate, instead of pages of multiple clicks through forms. Members can even batch process photos to add and edit information, including settings to make your photos public or private, or adding different levels of copyright (including Creative Commons licensing).

Just by uploading photos to your Flickr account, also known as your Photostream, you automatically enter sharing mode. Users can sometimes find the photos you've marked public on the random photo feed on the Flickr home page. Individual photos can be shared easily by sending people the URL of a specific photo page, or by blogging a photo by pressing a button just above the photo (after a three minute setup process). Clicking on the "Different sizes" link will take you to a particularly nifty and useful page where you can see your photo in various sizes, as well as the URL for the photo and the prefab HTML code (which includes and image (<IMG>) tag as well as a link (<HREF>) tag that points to the photos page on your Flickr account) for adding a photo of a particular size to a web page. Don't forget the feed aspect of the service. Anyone with a news aggregator can subscribe to any Photostream via RSS or Atom, or add a photo stream to their My Yahoo! page.

Nice selection of photo upload tools: check. Multiple, easy ways to push photos: check. Great help documentation: check. WD-40 goal: accomplished.

Goal 2: "The 'album' metaphor is in desperate need of a Florida condo and full retirement."

Static online photo albums, with cumbersome forms-based upload and edit, "I'm the poster, you're the viewer" interfaces are so five years ago. We live in an age of online collaboration and digitally shared opinions, and Flickr fosters that through it's tools and the ability to share the maintenance through sharing the experience.

It's all about the folksonomy aspect of the service, which is all the rage on the web these days. Users really dig being able to tag their photos, basically adding metadata keywords (or several keywords without spaces) to their photos. You can even set your account so that anyone can add or edit your tags, to assist you with your photo organization.

Earlier in the life of Flickr, the way to group together photos from, say, an event or an organization, was to have the photos share the same tag. This idea is now enhanced by the recently released Group feature, through which photos can be shared by adding them to a Group's Pool, or collective Photostream. A user can gather photos into personal groups, called Sets, using a simple-but-powerful drag and drop interface called the Organizr.

Using the Comment feature, members of the service can leave comments about photos, much like leaving a comment on a blog, or adding a post to a bulletin board. The Note feature, which is the Comment on steroids, allows you to select a portion of the actual photo, and leave a note that is readable by mousing over the selected area.

The whole idea is that the various sharing options will allow a broader source of metadata, according to a user's preferences, helping a member to better catalog their photos. I like to think of Flickr as a sort of WorldCat of photos, where collections can be shared, commented on, tagged, and favorited by the collective of owners and viewers, depending on your preferences as an account holder. Flickr's organization features make this service the younger, hipper replacement to the dated photo album concept.

Making a Library Flickr-tastic, or even just Flickr-friendly

So how can libraries utilize such a crazy robust tool? Here are some ideas to get you started.

Get Flickr at Your Library

• Start a Flickr account for your library, and start playing with the service through practical application. Photos are a staple for library advertising, and Flickr is an excellent, centrally located method for storing and sharing event photos, archive documents, or even scanned entries from an art contest.
• Set up a Flickr badge for your home page (Exeter (RI) Public Library has a nice example on their home page), so that thumbnails of your photo collection are rotating on your home page using an automated script.
• In your next presentation, add a link to a slideshow to one of your Flickr Sets to show off your latest event idea, digital collection, or a compilation of photos to illustrate a theme.
• Flickr is an excellent centrally located, offsite accessible resource (via the web) if you don't have a file server for your library or just for your department. You can easily upload, title, describe, tag, and organize your photos, then push the photos to your library's blog, add your photos to other web pages using prefab <IMG> tag code that links back to the original on Flickr. You can even upload photos while you're away at a conference instead of waiting until you return.

If you can't beat 'em, guide 'em: While the idea of a patron creating a taxonomy, or even simply the idea of the folksonomy, may sound absurd to some librarians, the fact of the matter is tagging is a hot property on the cyber landscape. Librarians, as a rule, should never cease to excel at organizing even using new systems, or evolving their skills to meet the needs and interests of patrons. An excellent way for librarians to get a grip on the homemade metadata movement is to guide patrons on how to effectively tag their photos. Library instructors can take some time to read up on folksonomies, play with Flickr to get a sense of how users tag items. Then, offer instruction classes on how to use Flickr as a photo web service, including tips on getting the best out of tagging photos and creating sets. It's like teaching a patron how to catalog a collection near and dear to them on a level that makes sense to the patron, and showing the patron that you get them and their information needs.

Everyone *loves* policies

As much as I'd like to say that starting an account is all it takes for a library to get started, a little extra work needs to be done. Libraries should carefully examine any new service, technology, or process for usefulness, develop goals for use, and implement subsequent policies to make sure that everyone is on the same page using the service (before, or even while, using the service). From my experience implementing a Flickr account for Reading (MA) Public Library, here are a few things to keep in mind in dealing with this process for the Flickr service:

Permission to name names: Especially when dealing with photos of children, consider any necessary legal requirements. At Reading, we've learned that several public schools require a permission slip to be signed by parents when an event will be photographed to obtain permission to publish those photos and name the children. Kids love having their photos taken at library events, and we love showing off how much fun everyone is having, but safety and privacy is always a concern. Be sure to figure out a policy to deal with this issue, whether it includes obtaining permission before or after you take the photos (Reading may end up having different policies for different departments).

Flickr tip: You can mark photos Private, so that only you can see them, until the permission is obtained to publicly publish it to the web; if permission cannot be obtained, at least the picture remains in your collection.

Collection development: You may end up in a position, at some point, to consider whether or not to include photos taken by a patron or even a professional photographer at an event, or just tooling around the library, and what sorts of copyright issues that may entail. Much like a link development policy, decide ahead of time how you want to deal with digital content proposed by someone other than you staff, and what the selection criteria might be. Also, decide who on staff in responsible for managing the Flickr collection, including uploading photos, and permissions to tag, title, create sets, and delete photos. You only get one login per account, so sharing responsibility includes sharing policies and methods, unless you set up different accounts, as an example, for each department.

Groups and contacts: Flickr is a natural social networking environment, and while participating in the sharing, commenting, and favoriting of photos really allows you to fully enjoy the magic, you can choose whether or not you partake of these features of the service, and how. Explore the options, and develop the necessary policies. It might be nice to join or start a group for libraries, since there are a good number of libraries using Flickr. Just remember, once your photos are up there and publicly viewable, other users can add you as a contact, view, favorite, or comment on your photos, even if you choose not to reciprocate or utilize these aspects of the service.

Flickr tip: Comments can be disabled on a per-photo or a general default basis, or alternately, you can delete comments as necessary.

Reading Public Library is still in the very beginning stages of using Flickr, but we're learning a lot about what the service can do for us as a library, and how we'll explore and manage Flickr as a valuable tool.

In the past, librarians needed to show patrons how to look for information. Recently, librarians have needed to pay attention to how patrons go about finding information for themselves. Given how self-service our patrons have become, librarians need to pay close attention to the next step in patron evolution, where the patrons become the source coders of the next generation of taxonomies, and Flickr is a prime example of that. Flickr also shows that a useable and fun service go a long way with patrons, and libraries can certainly take a lesson from this wildly popular and rapidly growing service, and have some fun with a new technology at the same time.

Andrea Mercado is the author of the LibraryTechtonics.info blog, a part-time Reference & Techie Librarian at Reading Public Library in Reading, MA, and the co-manager of the PLA Blog [http://www.plablog.org].She will present at a WebJunction Online Community Live Event at the end of September 2005 on the use of Flickr at Reading Public Library. She will also be presenting at Internet Librarian 2005 in October on how conference blogging relates to the changing roles of librarians. [Contact Andrea]