Friday, April 18, 2008

Week 6 assignment: Online photo sharing

Blog about the process [uploading online photos] on your personal blog for this course and share how this concept might be used in your library.

Are you sure you can handle this? The instructions were to upload a picture to our Facebook account and our blog, and I did... although only you, dear readers, get the full scope of what I was up to this afternoon:

All is not as it seems

The beauty of the Flickr preview is that all may not necessarily be as it seems. This is a triptych created with an external Mosaic Maker and if someone were to see a preview it only shows the middle picture where I look perfectly normal. That middle picture is also the one I put on Facebook.

The other two are rather reflective of my state of mind as I'm realizing that the past 10 years of my completely-non-library career aren't relevant to my medical library job that I'm starting on May 1st. It's a good change, absolutely, but a strange one to process on a cognitive level. How can a decade of work not matter and the slate be wiped clean to begin again when I already feel so old?

Oh wait, my personal reflections are not part of the assignment. My bad.

As for how Flickr could be used in our particular library, I'm not all that convinced it would. What medical images we do have in an academic medical library are tucked in both proprietary and open access databases with a variety of search methods available, cataloging structures, and vast quantities of storage space. If we have any unorganized and unpublished images in our collection that aren't under copyright, we'd probably create our own database to manage them (like these) instead of using Flickr. I didn't realize the American Social Hygiene posters existed before now and am off to have some fun surfing those!

2 comments:

Connie Crosby said...

Welcome to the biblioblogosphere! Looks like you are doing a great job with that course. Keep up the great work, and see you on twitter. :-)

Cheers,
Connie

Nikki Dettmar said...

Thank you, Connie! I am pleased that the Medical Library Association (MLA) is offering a Web 2.0 class that anyone can follow.. but have actually been far more interested in seeing my classmates reactions to it. Look forward to following your blog as a law librarian, I'm fond of my medlib colleagues but tend to microfocus and I'm too new to do that!