Flickr collection : A Comparative Study of Web 2.0 School Library Spaces

To present the findings of my comparative study of secondary school websites, I created a collection of screenshots and added comments, using Paint and then uploaded them in a set to the INF 506 photo pool. The collection uploaded without any problems, it can be viewed via my URL:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/w11j/6180747998/in/pool-1325758@N20/
I enjoyed using Flickr as a photo management and sharing tool and I think it has great potential for application in education and libraries. It provides a “Guide to get the most out of Flickr” that clearly explains how to upload and connect to your camera, cameraphone or your blog, and to share photos via email, Facebook, RSS feed or Atom feed. This software gives users the options of displaying their own photos privately or publicly, or creating a group photo pool, which could be used as a forum for discussion.Contributors can allow friends to add tags to their photos. These features make it a potentially great resource for teacher librarians to use for collaborative projects with staff or student groups.
It has a user- friendly interface and it offers step- by- step prompts to assist beginners to upload photos and tag them. Viewers can select popular tags to view photos from all over the world on a broad range of topics. Viewers can connect to a ‘photostream’ from NASA or the archives of the Library of Congress, The Smithonian and The Commons. Willis Wee (2010, INFOGRAPHICS) suggests that properly tagged photosets of a company (library) events can help customers to put a face on the team behind your brand. Users can create a strip of photos that can be used to ‘design a badge’, the code of the ‘badge’ can be cut, pasted, and uploaded to your blog template. Rancourt (2009, p.77-78) created the Flickr page for the Manchester City Library (U.K) to share photos that would capture some of the warmth, diversity, culture and social benefits of the library community and to provide some insight into the lives of community members and library staff. He encouraged library staff to upload a photo per day, then he used a strip of seven of the latest photos to create a unique ‘badge’ for the library blog.This could be a great way for a school library to connect with all sectors of a school community.

 Photos from Flickr can be copied and pasted into presentations, where creative commons allow. A designated section of this site displays photos where many users have chosen to offer their works under Creative commons license. Flickr provides photographic examples and explanations of the classifications of ‘attribution of copyrighted works’, ‘noncommercial’ and ‘no derivative works’ and ‘share alike’, which only allows distribution of derivative works under license. This section could be used to develop students understanding of these concepts and principles of digital citizenship. 

Rancourt, L. (2009). Mashing up the library website. In N.C. Engard (Ed.), Library mashups: exploring new ways to deliver library data. (pp. 73 – 86). London: Facet.

Wee, Willis. (2010) Guide to Social Media Marketing landscape. In INFOGRAPHICS. CMO –Social Landscape-R5-pdf.