Innovative Photosharing for Libraries
Photosharing website are well established and popular among individual Internet users. More recently, libraries and librarians have been making innovative users of photosharing. In this post, I will explore the characteristics of present-day photosharing systems, the objectives of libraries and librarians, and how the two impact each other.
The Characteristics of Photosharing Sites
There are dozens of different photosharing websites available to the public (Wikipedia lists just some of them, and larger lists exists, though many photosharing sites on these lists no longer exist). While each site typically has a niche, the most popular ones (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket) have several common characteristics (see also The Common Craft video on Photosharing):
- Storage
- They allow users to create create accounts and upload and store digital photos
- Sharing
- They provide users the ability to make their photos available to others online
- Organization
- They allow users to organize their photos in various ways (i.e. categorized, sorted, tagged, geotagged)
- Automated Processing
- They provide for automatic process of photos (e.g. creation of thumbnails, different sizes, rotation)
- Rights Management
- They provide for licensing declaration (i.e. typically declaration of a creation commons license). They provide for some form of access control (i.e. allowing a user to decide who can see their photos)
- Search and Discovery
- They provide users the ability to search, explore, and discover other user’s public photos
While the common features are driven by user need, newer features are driving user to find innovative photosharing users.
Many photosharing sites now offer Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs). APIs allow for the creation of software applications that can interact directly with the photosharing services and data. This allows, for example, for 3rd parties to write programs that make it easier to upload photos to photosharing sites or to create commercial services that publish print copies of users photos that are already stored on photosharing site.
Many new features are in the form of automated processing options. For example, tools to remove “red eye” from photos. Other emerging features of photosharing sites are geotagging (i.e. identifying and searching for where a photo was taken), automated face recognition, visual search (i.e. searching for what is in a photo, not what it is called), and mashups (i.e. combining photosharing services with services of completely different sites).
The Objectives of Libraries and Librarians
Libraries and librarians have many purposes. I will categorize the most common as:
- Access
- Providing access to materials held by the library to the public. This is fundemental to libraries
though libraries different greatly on what and how they provide access. - Preservation
- Preserving information artifacts of historical or cultural significance. Not all libraries have a
preservation role. Some libraries invest significantly in preservation. Often libraries must strike
a difficult balance between access and preservation to rare or delicate materials. - Organization
- The access and preservation roles of libraries require and are facilitated by better organization
of information. Libraries often have staff who are experts in the organization of knowledge. - Reference
- Libraries and librarians help people find information. This is a natural
outcome of the three previous roles. Experts in the organization of knowledge, are ideally suited
to help other find information. Those institutions that provide access to information resources
are the point of need for people who requiring help finding information. - Intellectual Freedom
- Libraries, and more often individual librarians, play a special role in supporting intellectual freedom.
Some librarians advocate for open access to information and decry cencorship and misinformation.
Innovative Applications of Photosharing by Libraries and Librarians
There is a clear overlap between the characteristics of photosharing sites and the roles that libraries and librarians play. For example, both are concerned with preservation (i.e. storage) of information, providing access, organizing, and helping people find information. It is no wonder then that libraries and librarians have begun to make innovative use of photosharing sites. In the following sections I will highlight some real and potential uses of photosharing.
Improving Access and Organization: Library of Congress and Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/
The Library of Congress (LoC) has a large collection of photos that it preserves. It recent began to digitize these photos and make them available on their website. However, the to work to digitize photos is expensive and time consuming, the work to organize and describe those photos is even more so. Furthermore, the community of people who would likely want to access those photos are not necessarily users of the LoC website. LoC began an experiment with Flickr to solve the problem of organizing and describing the photos in their collection and to help reach a broader audience. The uploaded their digitized photos to Flickr and set the photo permissions so that anyone could add tags to describe them. By doing this the photos are available to broader audience, through a rich interface, and description via tagging is done for them for free.
The manner in which this was done is simple an elegant. The LoC simply has a Flickr account, like any other user. They use Flickr sets for each of the photo collections they upload. The LoC reports that that the experiment has been an overwhelming success and
The success of this experiment has lead to the development of The Flickr Commons. This is a partnership between Flickr and many libraries (and similar institutions) with photos that are in the public domain. Like the LoC, these institutions upload their photos to Flickr to make them widely accessible and to allow users to describe them with tags.
The impact of tagging cannot be overlooked in supporting the role of access. Searching for photos is notoriously difficult. Search is typically done with words, but that requires that someone describe what is in the photo first. However, what one person sees in a photo may differ from what someone else sees. So, in theory, the more people describing a photo the most likely it is to be discovered and accessed by others.
Creative Commons Search
Many photosharing systems allow users to specify a license under which other may use their photos. Creative Commons licenses are common and there are now an
enormous number of freely-reusable photos available. This has lead to photosharing sites to become a source
of stock photography used in the creation of visual materials and in presentations.
Librarians are prolific presenters and conference goers and
being able to find creative commons licensed photos for use in presentations is handy. Flickr has a very prominent Creative Commons search feature. Similarily, librarians are
often involved in instruction of patrons and that necessitates the creation of visual learning materials where this could
be helpful.
Visual Search
At the reference desk, patrons may be looking for specific photos. In this case, it is not only useful to know
about creative commons search for images, but also about the variety of photosharing sites and their special
features. For example, most allow for searching of images by tag, title, or keywords in descriptions, but some have
more advanced features. For exmaple, Riya is a search engine and photosharing
site that specializes in visual search. It is able to do more than simply search for words that others have
typed in as tags. It can identify colors in images and has built-in face recognition. If you upload a photo of a person,
Riya can help you search for photos on the web of that person.
Promotion of Events
Flickr widgets can be used for marketing library events. For example, at the top of this site there is a banner that
displays photos my from Flickr account. Public libraries are often involved in community events and have a vested
interest in marketing them. Similarily, library conferences often now specific a common tag to be used by
participants to tag their own uploaded photos so that others can find them after the confernence.
Fast & Cheap Archives
While large libraries are likely to have budgets to support serious preservation of their photo collections, some small public libraries may want to digitally preserve their materials but may not have the resources to invest. They may be tempted to use photosharing services as an archive for preseveration. While inexpensive, this carries the risk of losing those photos is the service goes out of business. A way to manage this risk is to use a tools such as Pixelpipe, which can upload photos to multiple photosharing sites at once. Two or three $25/year accounts could provide substantial preservation value for a library on a tight budget.
Examples from Photosharing sites
Embedded from Picasa
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| From Drop Box |
Zoomr
Thanks, Mike. I hadn’t read about the Flickr commons yet so was glad to see you talk about it. I am curious to know about how you view photosharing in libraries in a broader context–what does this mean in terms of access (e.g. should/could libraries be loaning digital cameras to patrons) and how photosharing can be part of teaching patrons about visual and information literacy.
I’m really glad you asked that Joanne. I ran out of time writing my post and unfortunately, I didn’t cover the big picture. I don’t use the L-word, but I think I can address the broader context in other ways. There are two high-impact library contexts for photosharing. The first is marketing and the second is community participation.
Effective marketing is vital for libraries. It isn’t enough to offer services, services must be delivered and marketing is how we ensure that those who can use our services do user our services. I’m not referring to advertising here, but a comprehensive strategic management process that involve planning, implementing, measuring, and reflecting on service delivery. Library services can be hard to market however. While you will find many people who know that they can borrow books from public libraries for little or no cost, you will find fewer people that know about other programs and services the library offers. In post-secondary libraries, marketing of reference and online services are at issue.
The question behind library marketing becomes, how can we communicate what we do, the value of it, and how users can make use of the service: a user needs to have some intuition about all of these things before they are likely to attempt to use a service. A tool to address this, that most librarians are equipped to use, is story-telling and photosharing is an ideal platform for storytelling!
One small example, comes very close to home. When the University of Alberta’s Cameron Library was undergoing renovations there was a need to communicate to users during and after the renovations what had changed, what was the same, what they could expect, and where they could get service. One tool they used was a blog that relied heavily on photos that came from their Flickr gallery. The photos on the blog linked to the Flickr gallery, the gallery contained more photos than were on the blog, and the photos told a story about the transition. It wasn’t a simple policy communication (e.g. “Please proceed to the second floor to check out your books.”) it was a story about the people and the place and what was happening. It was only part of a communication strategy but an effective though small component.
I like the Cameron Library example because it shows an important limitation/characteristic of using photosharing. Photosharing needs to be combined with other tools (in this case a blog) to gain traction. The photosharing site and its features (e.g. organization via tagging, sets, collections) help you to tell the story, but you still need to promote it. There are logs of good ways to do this, and by putting your “photo story” on a social media site like Flickr you may benefit from others publicizing your photos as well. For example, Cameron Library could add their photos to Flickr groups like the SLIS group of the University of Alberta group. If you can find a community that might be interested in knowing whatever-it-is that is communicated in your photos, you benefit from sharing the photos there: users will find their way to your gallery and see your story.
I think libraries should put photos that show their signs, their service points, their self-serve machines, their facilities, and their events. Photos can communicate a lot, and photos attract attention (cognitive science research shows photos with faces, especially with faces looking at something even more so). On Flickr you’ll find groups about library signage, so I’m not the only one who thinks this way. Is someone more likely to refrain from cell phone use if they read the sign at the time they need to use their phone, or if they already saw a photo of the sign before they can to the library and knew what to expect?
My second context for photosharing in libraries is community participation. I find that a lot of professional LIS literature refers to libraries in a service/consumer way. Even my first half of this post did! It’s a valid but limiting perspective. A modern view on marketing services is that markets are conversations (See Seth Godin’s books for more on this). If your not part of the conversation, your not marketing your services. I like to turn this idea around and describe it differently: libraries are not providing services to a community; they are not a public service institution: libraries are participants in communities. Libraries are of their communities and for their communities. This means that libraries should be actively finding their community online and participating there, not just waiting for the community to come calling.
A radical (non-photosharing) example of this would be for reference librarians from Edmonton Public Library to go out to Q&A sites (e.g. Ask Metafilter and find questions by people from Edmonton and answer them there, linking back to EPL resources.
Photosharing can be an enabling technology if you buy into this community participation context. Public libraries certainly host community events and photos of those events could be contributed through photosharing site (under creative commons so that others can use them for blogging about the events. That’s the mundane example. It gets more interesting when you consider that public libraries are often called upon in addressing social issues: services for the homeless, job seekers, even health crisis (e.g. The Alberta Library was asked to find ways to disseminate the Alberta Government’s fact sheets on BSE/mad-cow). What if libraries collaborate beyond their own walls by both generating, and collecting, and disseminating photos?
This fits perfectly with your specific question: should libraries be lending digital cameras? I’d answer with a qualified yes (it’s a material budget issue, with technical support costs, and limited by the ability of the staff to make effective purchasing decisions, but other than that yes). I would also go further, and say that libraries should be aggressive in helping those they collaborate with make effective use of social information technology. When the AB gov’t came to TAL wanting to spread the word about BSE, they put up some PDF files on their website. They could have asked, “what else do you have?” Where are your posting this online? Librarians help people find answers, and I think it is now time that they started connecting the people who have answers with the people who have questions proactively: this is what social media allows us to do.
Again, with photosharing, the opportunity is visual story telling. Communities have no shortage of storytellers and readers. Libraries have no shortage of collaborators and opportunities for collaboration. It’s seems like a good match.
I’ll illustrate this with a concrete example. Recently, there was the ETS TransitCamp with participants posting photos on Flickr. There were also videos and blog postings. These kinds of events happen all the time for all kinds of events. What if the libraries put their collection development skills to work and connected the different individuals posting their photos? What if they offered to preserve a representation of these community events? What if they helped event organizers take advantage of social media? A simple way is that most event organizers don’t take the simple step of publicizing a single tag with which participants can tag their photos. This makes a big deal when it comes to finding information about the event: who better than to help than experts in helping people find stuff?