Flickr and Using Images

Beautiful photo of the Backs. Image by Alex Brown on Flickr

I'd heard of Flikr but not used it before. I was impressed by the incredible quality of many of the photos I looked at, and I think the Creative Commons licensing scheme makes it a very valuable resource for libraries to find and make use of images. Pictures and photographs can be very powerful, and are always a good addition to a poster or presentation to make it interesting and eye-catching. Perhaps even more useful is the possibility of creating a library Flickr account which could be used to publicise the library, its collections and events. Photographs of the library building and its layout and facilities could potentially help to advertise the services that are on offer, while photos of displays could help to promote and attract attention to special exhibitions. Of course these latter uses would require users to view the library's Flickr page, but a photostream from the Flickr site to a library website might have more potential viewers if that is possible. This would also help to keep the library website visually fresh and interesting, with new images providing a regular update to the page.

My igoogle page with Sir Cam Flickr photostream

iGoogle

After initally setting up my iGoogle page, I had quite a bit of fun exploring the different gadgets available, choosing a 'theme' and rearranging my page! Searching for library 'stuff', I found the vast majority of gadgets available were American, but I was happy to be able to add the Cambridge Libraries Widget! Creating a 'Library Gadgets' tab was fairly straightforward, and I can see that the use of tabs is an excellent way to organise different subjects into neat folders, and de-clutter the home screen. I think it's great to have a single page which contains such useful tools as library catalogues, google maps, Wikipedia, Gmail, and the weather forecast, and it would definitely make a useful home page.

My iGoogle Page

However, I find the page can be very slow to load, and I am not so keen on using it as a means of managing rss feeds. I find that Bloglines works well, as it clearly displays new items and allows you to save any that you want to read again, or don't have time to finish looking at. From what I can see, you need to have a good look at the rss feed boxes on the iGoogle page to identify new items, which would be fairly time consuming if you had lots! I suppose Google Reader is a more suitable tool for managing large numbers of RSS feeds, and is therefore quite similar to Bloglines.

Overall, I found this a very interesting exercise as I hadn't really heard much about Start pages before. As a means of pulling together and organising useful tools and information from the vast amount of material that is available on the web, and allowing the creation of a single collection that is relevant to an individual, I think it is a highly valuable device.