Photo Sharing

The exercise this week was great. I didn't realize at all that the Library of Congress had a Flicker site. I sent this on to my brother who is a HUGE sports history buff. He thought it was really "cool". Uploading and sharing the pictures is really easy. I use Photobucket and Kodak Gallery to share pictures and videos of my son. It is easy once you figure out how it works. Of course I can't get the grandparents to understand they can go to the library to look at the pictures. They would rather wait to get the videos and pictures in the mail from us. The rest of the family loves them but a lot of businesses block the pictures.

Libraries can really utilize this technology to establish the friendly face. Have staff directories with faces. Of course several people mentioned stalking. So there may be concerns there. But if someone works in the public setting then there is always the chance someone will grow obsessed with them. I think what LC has done with flicker really shows how this technology could be harnessed to make Archives better. I wish now that I had this technology back when I was still a single librarian in the hospital. I could have used this to digitize our Archives.

Google Docs

I think Google Docs and other document sharing services can be very useful with organizations that are spread geographically but not necessarily the same organization. Perfect example would be an MLA Taskforce that needs to work on a document and each contribute. While the members of the taskforce can't necessarily have the same drive on a network (since members are belong to different organizations) it would be useful to use this type of system. I think it can also be useful working on large files that need to be shared within your organization because you can't open a normal word file or such if someone else has it open and make changes. I don't know though if this is really the future of document sharing. I see security concerns limiting its use for major corporations. I did like the functionality of the service and I'm in fact suggestion an organization that I volunteer with that this might be something we could use that would be useful. This was a really good learning experience and the first one that I really had NO idea about before starting.

Social Bookmarks

This was an easy lesson as my husband and I have been using del.icio.us to share our favorite bookmarks with family and friends on a variety of topics. This could be used by hospitals or libraries to bring together resources without having to "create" a webpage. Yet I see a wiki and other resources that have been discussed doing the same thing. So I'm not sure the value if you are already using a lot of the other resources that I've learned about now. I could see this as a way around security that an smaller hospital might have blocking wikis and blogs though. However, I'm not sure. As a librarian and "organizer" I love the ability to tag. My husband loves the resource because he has built a ton of links to favorite on flying airplanes in simulators that he can share with other enthusiast. I like the fact that there is a separate backup to our hard drive bookmarks. I also like that with my work computer. For security it is NICE!