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July 25, 2007
Beyond Flickr Exhibits - Flickr Slideshows!
Thanks to Sue for the shout-out about the Dentistry Library Flickr exhibits and reference. There is a new tool called SlideFlickr that creates embeddable Flickr slideshows (Flash-based) you can use in a blog entry or on a web page.
Dentistry Library: Virtual Exhibit: http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/dentlib/archives/2007/07/virtual_exhibit.html
Now, if only the plug-in was already installed on the staff computers ...
Posted by pfa at 01:14 PM | Comments (0)
Combine Twitter & Flickr
Twitku is a tool to send and receive posts to and from both Twitter and Jaiku. Twitku now shows a thumbnail of an image when you include the link from Flickr in the tweat/jaik.
So let's say you combine the two types of functionality for marketing. Create an account in Twitter for the library. Create a matching account in Jaiku. Have a Flickr account. Then create a Twitter / Jaiku stream to promote new books or items from special collections or such. For example, you could say everyday at 10am there will be a tweat/jaik about some cool thing on the New Books shelf. Have a picture of the cover image or title page or something visually interesting. Put the pic in Flickr, and include a tinyurl link to the Flickr pic in a tweat about the book, with a quote, title or link to the record (PURL) in Mirlyn or LibraryThing. Then do the same sort of thing at 2pm highlighting things from our special collections.
Bet any booklovers would subscribe to the feed? I sure would!
There are other neat things going on with Twitter for libraries. TwitterProse highlights a book a day, with brief quote. So does TwitterLit. BookTwo is "reading" James Joyce to the twittersphere. Maybe there are other mashups that would combine the Twitter functionality with some other source of information to create interesting ways to project information soundbites. Here is a list of Twitter mashups. Any other ideas?
Frantic Industries: All Twitter tools and mashups in one place: http://franticindustries.com/blog/2007/04/04/all-twitter-tools-and-mashups-in-one-place/
Posted by pfa at 12:41 PM | Comments (1)
July 16, 2007
Wikis for micro collaborations
Does anyone have any thoughts or opinions about promoting wikis for very small-scale collaborations and projects?
My six-person book club just started a wiki to help us keep track of what we've read, schedule dates for future meetings, suggest what to read next, and share links to all the articles, websites, and YouTube videos that come up during our discussions. It is turning out to be a perfect tool for the kind of sharing and planning we want to do, and everyone really likes it, even the non-techies and non-librarians. It has gotten me thinking about the capabilities of wikis beyond the wisdom-of-crowds, millions-of-anonymous-Wikepedia-editors framework.
It also makes me wonder if the library might want to promote wikis for much smaller projects and collaborations. Maybe in addition to MBlog we could try to create something like MWiki, which would be separate from CTools, and would allow people to set up small, password-protected wikis for group projects, faculty collaborations, student organizations, or whatever. There are already some good platforms out there - my book club is using PB wiki - but there are good blog platforms, too, and we created MBlog anyway.
Thoughts?
Posted by makleinm at 01:20 PM | Comments (0)
Collaborative research on social bookmarking
Several HSL librarians (including me, Patricia Anderson, and Preet Rana) and med school faculty are discussing a project to explore how medical students use del.icio.us to communicate and share resources relevant to their classes. If anybody is doing something similar in another subject area, it would be interesting to compare notes.
Posted by janeblum at 12:07 PM | Comments (2)
July 06, 2007
Create Online Exhibits with Flickr
The title pretty much says it all. Take some pictures, load them on Flickr, create some captions, add a link to the Flickr set of images on your web page or blog and away you go...
Check out our own Dentistry Library to see what Patricia has done on Flickr
Posted by swortman at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)
Del.icio.us Tags and Subject Guides
Here's a simple idea, use del.icio.us tags to supplement a subject guide or create a new subject guide. You could do this several ways. You could feed the del.icio.us links directly into your subject page (maybe, not sure how this would work with the Grad library database setup) like Suzanne has done on the Usability site or create an entire guide like the Health Science Library has already done.
You could also just have a link to your del.icio.us page, like the Lansing, Illinois Public Library has.
These links can then be syndicated so that users could then subscribe to an RSS feed and see when new links have been added. The idea of creating tags in del.icio.us also would help to organize the links and help people find links of interest. You could accept suggestions for links from other del.icio.us users.
Posted by swortman at 10:48 AM | Comments (2)