RCPL Tech Challenge Four

Flickr
I had used Flickr before, but never really played with it - now I'm hooked! Searching RCPL found a couple of pictures of the escalators, and searching Richland County Public Library found a few more pictures of the architecture. I also found a lot of pictures from the other RCPL. A search on South Carolina Public Libraries brought up lots of pictures from all over the state (thanks to Curtis!). Then I tried my own searches - there's lots of knitting to be found on Flickr. What a great resource to use if you're thinking about a certain pattern and want to see how it turned out for others. I got so involved in searching for pictures of various patterns that it ate up much of my Friday night. Because then, of course, I had to open my own account and upload all of my knitting pictures. I love having a place to "file" and keep track of everything I've knitted and I wish I'd done it sooner. I created sets, added tags, uploaded tags, and then found a way to add a cool Flickr badge to my blog. I fully expect to keep up with the Flickr account even if I run out of time to keep the blog up.

As far as how the library might use Flickr -well, there are obvious PR implications here. A search of what's out there now indicates that there's interest in our architecture. I'd like to see an RCPL account - we could create a photoset that just includes pictures of the building and then we could also create a photoset of people - staff, pictures taken at programs, etc. (when PR takes pictures of programs, they are already getting permission to publish from the subjects, so that shouldn't be a problem). Then we could also create photosets of special programs, like Tisket or ABD. This could even replace the current Photo Gallery on the library website - keeping these pictures on Flickr would be much easier.

YouTube
I have used YouTube quite a bit -it's a great place to find old music videos and commercials as well as user-created files. I've used it to find (and re-watch) a great SNL sketch called "Lazy Sunday", and I've also used it to find knitting-related videos (there was a greatknitting-related cartoon that I saw not too long ago) a search on "knitting" brings up over 2000 results! Not too long ago I had a strange compulsion to see if there had ever been a video for an old Tracy Ullman song (They Don't Know) that was big inthe 80's. There was, and I watched it on YouTube. I can see another Friday night trickling away. Even a search on public libraries brings up almost 500 results.

As with Flickr, there are some definite PR possibilities for using YouTube for RCPL. For example, a video tour of the library, or a weekly/monthly/quarterly (whatever) Readers' Advisory vidoe ("what we're reading" or something like that). We could also film programs and post those too (Like the Pigskin Poets program that's so popular), or important events like the parking of the bookmobile. All of those would be great to upload. Of course, the one issue with YouTube is that it requires a bit more equipment - not only a video camera (which I'm sure we've got) but the software to convert and upload the material (though perhaps we've already got that too).