Blue 2.0: Photos, Podcasting and Video

Flickr

Flickr is very cool, and very easy to use. I had no trouble uploading a bunch of photos, rotating the sideways ones, and arranging them into a slide show. I made one slide show for painting day (the day we painted our downstairs camera room and one corner of our lab) and another for Becky's Bon Voyage party before her trip to Italy.

A few things to note:

• If you are using a free account and your photos are large, resize your photos before uploading them. Flickr will only show a reduced copy of your photo anyway and you will use up less of your monthly quota this way.
• Flickr only wants your photos, not your drawings, screenshots or newspaper scans. Occasional ones are fine, as long as you tag them as such.

So far in the library we have used Flickr to share photos of department events. We may also use it in the future to share photos of our work area and processes for colleagues to view and use in presentations.


Podcasting

None of us had any podcast ideas that we were particularly fond of doing by ourselves (though Ben made one of himself reading Shakespeare) so we (Shell, Thom, Crystal, Ben and I) decided to record one together. It was very easy! We downloaded Audacity onto a lab computer, gathered around a headset microphone, and chatted about our experiences with Blue 2.0. We exported the file to MP3 (using the LAME library, which must be downloaded separately) and uploaded it to my web site. Our podcast was over half an hour long, so the file was so large that it would have used up a substantial amount of the quota offered by the free hosting site we looked at. We all enjoyed the experience so much that we are planning future podcasts. Any suggestions for content?


Video

There are many good library videos on YouTube, but this was my favorite that I found today:



Cookie Monster tries to get cookies from an increasingly frustrated librarian by sneaking in his request after a request for a book. I like this video for several reasons.

For one thing, it's Sesame Street!! One of my favorite uses of YouTube is looking up things I remember from my childhood and getting all nostalgic about them. Remember that series of public service announcements with the clock guy who talks about nutrition and hygiene? Time for Timer is on YouTube! That freaky Raggedy Ann musical? The songs are on YouTube!

Another reason: it parallels what Nerve and IFC have declared to be one of the 50 greatest comedy sketches of all time, Monty Python's Dead Parrot Sketch: "much of the joke stems from the rational man growing increasingly hysterical, while the irrational one remains perfectly calm".

The final reason is that Cookie Monster's request would not be so out of place in many of today's libraries. With the idea of "library as place" being important, many libraries have coffee shops and restaurants inside to make them more friendly places to be. I suspect that if I were to go to the circulation desk and order a picture book and a box of cookies, I would be directed to the Education Library and to Grub @ The Hub or the Ovid's/Starbucks in the same building.

Oh and one more link: Read or Die Another Day. Yuriko Readman ("The Paper") is my hero!

Currently working on a video of my own to post.