23 Things - #'s 5 & 6

My very first introduction to Flickr came just before my interview for the Circulation job at the Kankakee Public Library in March of last year... http://www.flickr.com/photos/kankakeepubliclibrary/

I wanted to aquaint myself with the library and its web site http://www.lions-online.org/ ,
and at the time really had no point of reference as to how far-reaching the photo sharing site actually was. Then it finally dawned on me in a follow-up visit to this page some time later to click on the "flickr" icon at the top left corner. During that particular visit (I think I had been hired by KPL by then), and in subsequent visits to see the latest KPL photos, I have enjoyed searching for a topic out of the tag cloud and seeing what photos have been shared about a particular topic. And, thanks to our Organization of Information class from last spring, I now know why some tags are bigger than others. : ) Once after my family and I returned from Anaheim this past summer, my daughters had a great time looking at photos taken from others during their visit to Disneyland (of course they still enjoy looking at the gazillion we took ourselves as well).

As far as mashups and 3rd party sites, I had not familarized myself with these other flickr web site resources prior to going through Library 2.0. At the risk of stating the obvious, the applications for which shared photos can be utilized is infinite. Among the examples listed on the mashup and 3rd party link, I particularly enjoyed the "trip planner" and the "photo mosaic." I was immediately reminded of a poster that hung on the door to the NIU Digitization Lab, where I completed my practicum this summer. It was a portrait of Abraham Lincoln made up entirely of hundreds (maybe thousands) of smaller photos taken during the period of the civil war. How it was put together was remarkable to me; maybe the creator used Flickr.