« I *can* read | Main | I just keep seeing the friendship »
August 3, 2005
Interesting policy issues introduced by Flickr
I was quite pleased to announce that my library now has a Flickr account, and that everyone on staff seems pretty stoked about it.
As with any locally disruptive technology, the introduction comes with it's own interesting dialog and loosely benign knots to untangle. When I gave my presentation to the reference staff, director, assistant director, and library admin assistant on what Flickr is, how it works, and what we could do with it, the presentation was interspersed with interesting questions and issues. I wanted to really talk about it all, but I also needed to get through the presentation, as I had a time limit to work within, but I'm encouraging the discussion of these bits:
- People, pictures, and names. We offer a great deal of programming, especially for children and teens (there's also a good deal of programming for adults and older adults, just not *as* much). The question arose of how we deal with permission to post photos, and names with photos. Someone posited that at the schools in town, they have kids and parents sign permission slips just to take the photos. Will it be OK to post the photos without names without official permission? Does it really just depend on our community? As readers, do any of you work for libraries with these policies? I'd love to hear from you.
For now, we figure that we can mark questionable photos private, and then make them public as we get permission, just so that we can get the pictures off the camera and placed in an appropriate set. We can also add patrons who have Flickr accounts as Contacts who are Friends, and use the privacy settings to share them that way, as well. - Wait, where did we put them? The nice thing about using Flickr is that it's a quick, easy, yet robust way to centrally organize photos (nevermind the fun and madness of tagging, metadata, sharing with badges, and comments). Even though we can upload the photos in their native size, and let Flickr resize them for us, the issue arose that it would be good to also store our originals locally (we're librarians, it's what we do). Our library doesn't currently have a file server, and it's one of the things that's been on my wish list since I started, so this is the perfect impetus to really get that rolling. We haven't had much trickle of hardware in the recent massive shift of old to new computers, but there may be one or two candidate machines that could be set up as a local file server. Sweet.
- Um, can I delete these? When I originally ordered the accessories for the camera, I ordered one 256MB memory card (to add to the 16MB of memory internal to the camera), but no card reader, since I figured the USB cable was sufficient, and why have extra hardware lying around. However, our YA librarians had the excellent idea of buying a memory card and reader for each department, so that each department could be responsible for their pictures. The idea was very well received, which is awesome. It will encourage departments to download their photos right away, instead of allowing them to languish on the camera indefinitely, and will alleviate the problem of wondering whether or not to delete photos on the camera to free up space. The only underlying issue is budget, so we'll see how it goes.
- Metadata madness. We might want to come up with a system to standardize our tagging just a smidgen. Since we're looking at 10 people at minimum with upload access to one account, we'll want to make sure we're all speaking the same tagging and metadata language. So very librarianesque! Coming up with simple guidelines on tags, title and description policies, and our copyright license notation shouldn't be hard, it just needs to be done. I'm sure it'll evolve over time as we use the service, and luckily I work in a library where everyone is flexible with growth and change.
That's all I can remember from the meeting for now. I'm sure as things progress I'll have more to talk about. I'm thinking about putting together a bulletin board for the library to talk about these sorts of things. We all seem to live in our email as an organization, and I'm not sure how well a bulletin board would fair given our current habits, but it wouldn't hurt to pitch the idea.
August 3, 2005 10:07 PM