Saturday 8 March 2008

Thing 5 - Exploring Flickr

The future of libraries! Twice as many books in half the space (or less!). This photo by stodmyk is of the UBC Library book retrieval system in the States - it's all automated. Macquarie University Library, my former home, will look similar by 2010. It's a great space-saving solution (ALWAYS an issue for libraries - I should know!). But I will miss wandering through the shelves and browsing by DDC number. And boy do I hope theyhave all the bugs worked out in programing etc. Going offline would not be pretty....or you could ask for economics and get english lit!

Sourcing this photo
Gotta say I cheated. This was posted on Slaw, a law library blog I read. But I have been poking around flikr (could get lost in there for days!) The communities are very inspiring - cheaper than joining the local photography club! As a librarian I love how the folksonomy tagging system has still been given some structure via the recommended tags...we will not be defeated! Although I guess you can argue that they were still developed from the grassroots...hmmm.

Blogging the pic was incredibly easy - there's a little button above the picture in flickr saying "blog this". It was a matter of stepping through some set-up screens, and hey presto! I'm blogging through flickr. That said, I can't seem to add links or anything (maybe if I used the actual coding?) so I will have to edit it in blogger anyway....oh well!

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