Flickr

Today I'm looking at Libraries using Flickr.

Flickr is a combination of picture-hosting and social networking, it allows individual users and organisations to create accounts (which is free), upload pictures and then share pictures with other accounts that they "friend", with groups that they join or just with everybody. Flickr is a part of Yahoo, so if you have a Yahoo account (or have signed up for yahoo-mail) then you can sign in to Flickr using your Yahoo id. I didn't even have to make an account, because I already had a yahoo account; I found this very convenient, as it's one less username/password combo I have to remember.

As well as simply hosting pictures, you can make a variety of different galleries (Flickr calls them a "photostream") and even make simple slideshows with your pictures.

For Flickr, I have chosen to look at the Metro Library group, which is actually a Flickr group, created by the Dorothy Peyton Gray Transportation Library and Archive, which is located in Los Angeles county in the USA.

Dorothy Peyton Gray Transport Library and Archive (created in 2009). Flickr: Metro Library. Viewed 3rd September 2010. < http://www.flickr.com/groups/metrolibrary/ >

I chose the Metro Library because, while it only has a few members, it is active, with a lot of items in its group pool and its photostream. The biggest downfall with Flickr, I think, is with the design; Flickr is not made for quick and easy browsing and as a result you can often use up a lot of time searching or browsing for pictures. Flickr's on-site and group searching helps this a bit, but then in order for it to be truly effective, you have to know what you are looking for, which some browsers don't. Another feature I don't particularly like, is that you have to continually go back to the group home page to get to different things. While this problem could be solved with a navigation bar, Flickr already has two separate navigation bars and to add another would be creating a lot of clutter on the top of the screen.

I enjoyed looking at the pictures in the pool and photostream, even though I'm not particularly interested in the topic. The photostream contains many scanned items from the Archive section of the Library, including photos of tracks, roads, vehicles and scans of company advertisements and logos. Some of the individual collections manage to provide a kind of overview from past to present, as they contain both Archive and current items. Without context from the industry or living in the area, I don't have the knowledge to say whether or not this is a good resource, but I can say that it has many pictures on the topic of public transportation in southern California and for anyone interested in such a thing, it would be good to look into.

- piff