Sex in Special Collections!

Did that get your attention? Have you ever seen a bra on a book? It's on exhibit in Special Collections - come and see more neat stuff!

Flickr

The more I look at Flickr, the more it reminds me of Google Images - lots of stuff, but no context. So if you want a generic picture of a cat, you can get one. If you want a picture of something older, or specific, it gets harder - it all depends on the metadata (tags).
I admit with a background as a photo archivist, I'm pickier than most. And as a new grad/teacher, I'm even pickier. But I did run across Slideshare, which I like much more! You can share PPt presentations there , so there's content and context. Here's one on library 2.0
http://www.slideshare.net/chadmairn/libraries-do-matter-enhancing-traditional-services-with-library-20/

TechThots - at the moment my mind is filled with Archivist's Toolkit, which is an open source program. It's not immensely more sophisticated than relational Access, but it is pre-configured, and it does have a good fast-data-entry interface. What I really like is - it's OS. What I really don't like is - there's no Idiots Guide.
I'm also running around with my new digital camera - ooohh, 19.95 is an upgrade for me, notice I'm an archivist, not a photographer. Look for a slide show to come :)

Another reason to let YouTube live

I hate tenors and I hate opera, but this guy is amazing! Of course, I can't carry a tune in the handbasket I'm taking to Hades, so I may be slightly prejudiced.

YouTube may take Sturgeon's Law to the extreme, but there are gems.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k08yxu57NA

7 1/2 habits

My hardest habit is always setting goals - my priorities shift often and I'm a strong believer in serendipity. Sometimes the chance encounter leads in the right direction. This is not what I started out to do - my BA is in El Ed, then I went off into a number of careers and jobs, all of which I learned from, then I did another BA, then I ended up in a library. If I had stuck to that early goal, I wouldn't be a librarian and wouldn't have brought the experiences I had along with me.

The easiest is being a life-long learner (see above). I had good examples - my mother and my little sister got their GEDs at the same time, my father earned licenses in different trades most of his life. I've been self-educated in several fields, and I figure I'll do several more before I push up the daisies - or push chickens out of mailboxes (you Ohio folks are a little strange.....)

I always want to be a newbie at something!

On the radar

OCLC is playing with tag clouds. WorldCat Identities produces pages for personal and corporate names. The first 100 are pretty cool, but I can't imagine dealing with a tagcloud of the 18 million names in WorldCat!

http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/

This may be a perpetual Beta, too. I was amused to search for Cornelius Ryan and check the related names. Related by datamining, perhaps, but not by bibliography - John Wayne may have appeared in a movie based on a book by Ryan, but that's the closest they may have ever come. But maybe not, maybe there's something hidden there - but hidden is what we're trying to get away from, isn't it?

Not that it's all bad - the timeline is useful, having the "by" and "about" on the same site is great, and genres can be VERY useful (see Asimov). And finding fictional characters, well, that goes without saying.

This will be great for public and schools librarians, but I bet it gets used even more by undergrads. This was a frequent request for Eng102 when I worked in a community college, and at the U, undergrads usually tried to "find it themselves".

Disintermediation works, too.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

If you haven't seen this one yet, it's definitely worth a look. This is why YouTube deserves to live, even if it proves Sturgeon's Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law . I find it interesting that it's used as an example of Pareto, father of the Long Tail. But that's the subject for another post).

I had hoped to use this for the introduction to a class for the summer, but alas, the MLS program I teach for is struggling its way into the 19th century, after a brave start with streaming video in 2000. Entropy works!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE&eurl

Flickr and the rest of the World

Flickr as a social site doesn't excite me much, but there are some interesting possibilities. I admit John Collier's photos caught my eye because I had worked with his FSA and Standard Oil (NJ) images. What I don't like is the lack of captions and metadata with the thumbnail - it's just too easy for them to get separated. One of the joys of the Stryker collections is the info that was collected and recorded, that give context to the images.

http://www.flickr.com/people/johncollierjr/

Of course, the fame of Migrant Mother (by Lange) is independent of the caption, but the difference between OWI and FSA photos is all explained in the background materials and captions. If you don't have that info, you're working blind. If that info is garbled, you're not doing too much better - here it's attributed to the FDR Library and NARA, and FDR as creator. Not! Lange shot it for the FSA, and the neg lives at LC, even if prints are all over.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pingnews/455806594/

I can hope that, like Wikipedia, it's self-correcting, but how many people have how much time to monitor how many of these sites, before the incorrect info overtakes the correct?

But I digress. It's very cool to get the images out there, where they'll be seen and used more than at the LC site. I want a way to link them up to textual info, tho. That happens sometimes. http://www.flickr.com/photos/cobalt/352042952/

I must admit the rest of flickr strikes me as "just for my buds". I'd love to see separate tags for "taken with my cell" and "documentary". But I'm fussy about my babies.

Other mashups, like Bubbler, are cute, but bore me quickly. I'm looking forward to more "serious" uses than "this is my clean closet".

And so it begins....

This is the beginning of my "23 Things" for the Ohio University Library's workshop. I hope that it will all be as fun and easy!

I discovered RSS feeds some time ago, so I'm going to share a few of my favorites:

Digitization 101 - Jill Hurst-Wahl always has something interesting to add on the topic.

EDUCAUSE RSS | Recent EDUCAUSE Quarterly List - This is a great one, if for nothing else than its "7 things you need to know" section, which is a quick rundown of new tech that teachers and students are using. If I only read one thing, this will be it.

SourceForge.net: SF.net Project News: ResCarta is a new one, for a new opensource software product for online collections. Not much going on yet, but it does have possibilities, and I'm an opensource fan.

LISNews.org keeps me in touch with the stuff my students are in touch with.