Done With Thing 5

Ok, I'm finished with Thing 5. I looked at all the different sites and got some ideas. I was thinking about the puzzle site that it might be a fun way to create and order a puzzle for someone who is getting some kind of award, recognition, retiring, etc. I was also thinking, on a personal level, that it would be fun to do puzzles for family members as gifts. (The picture, by the way, is an aerial view of where I work; I'm at the point now that if I'm posting to my blog I want to add an image.)

Calendars are always fun to play around with, and they do make a nice way to publicize collections and give them to Friends of the Libraries or Volunteers in the Libraries type groups. We're already two months (almost 3) into the new year, but I might play around with calendars a bit for the next year, using scanned images we already have from our collections. It might make a nice piece to give to our supporters.

As to sharing photos online. . . I'm still a little hesitant on this. I want to play around a little more with the rights and permissions types of stuff. But first, I want to see about sharing these with my immediate family. Once I'm comfortable at that level I might think about putting more stuff out to the public. I have noticed that many of the pictures are watermarked in some way as an additional protection. More, anyway, to think about.

Finally, I am a little sympathetic with one of the comments on the 23 Things blog: it gets to be a bit of a pain having all these usernames and passwords. Maybe there's a mashup there??!!

Thing 4 Option B

I'm having way too much fun with this which is why I'm spending more time on this at home as opposed to work. I just wouldn't get a whole lot done at work tinkering around the way I have. For the past hour or so I've created my own Flickr account and uploaded 200 images. One of the things I didn't catch is that the monthly display is limited to 200 images. When I was uploading the images I was paying attention to the other message I was getting from Flickr, i.e. that I was limited by the amount of monthly memory, 100MB. So I deleted some of the files for uploading to get it below the 100 meg limit; that left me with 219 images. But when I went to look at them all I got a message that some of my pictures would not be visible unless I deleted newer ones. I just left it as it was, figuring that the new month starts in a couple of days and maybe they'll become visible then. They did, after all, tell me that the photos hadn't been deleted; they just couldn't be seen (unless I wanted to upgrade to the premium version). I'll stick with the free version and just watch my monthly limits.

A few minutes later. . . I just went back to my Flickr account to pick out a pic to tag "23 Things On a Stick." When I did this the first time I forgot to add the quotation marks around the tag phrase so I ended up with the following tags: 23, Things, On, Stick. I went back and put the phrase in quotes to get it right. After that I changed the photo to "public" so that everyone can view it. At the moment its the only picture I've got marked that way, but I'm sure I'll change some of the others to "public" after a while. I just want to get the hang of working with this before I post a bunch of stuff to the world.

Now I'm trying to figure out how to post this to my blog. The instructions on Flickr are a little confusing, so I'll post this and come back when I've got things figured out.

Thing 4 Option A

It was too soon to quit for the night. I went back and looked at the exercise for Thing 4 and realized I was close to finishing the first option (I'm going to do the second option as well), so went back to Flickr and found an image from one of my earlier full text searches. I used the keywords Sherlock Holmes Minnesota and got 3 hits. Two were of the Centennial Showboat (site of last summer's production of "Sherlock's Last Case"), but the photo that caught my eye was one taken in my own library, of an item I helped acquire for the Holmes Collections. Its a photo of our Linus statue, with Linus as Sherlock Holmes. The photo is by Krista76, who lists her occupation as "rhetorician." Our Linus was part of the "Linus Blankets Saint Paul" (#72 in the order of things) tribute to native Charles Schulz. The statue was a gift to the Collections by The Saint Paul Foundation and the F. R. Bigelow Foundation in memory of Ronald M. Hubbs, former chairman of the Bigelow Foundation and an active Sherlockian. The Hubbs Family have been generous supporters of the Holmes Collections, providing a gift for cataloging the book collection (a project that took three years!). Ronald's son, George, was the first president of the Friends of the Sherlock Holmes Collections and his son, James (Jamie) served as a collection specialist for the Collection at the U of M for a number of years. So it was really neat to see Krista76's photo of "our" Linus!

At the Beginning of Thing 4

Some first impressions of Flickr. I took the tour of the site and pretty much decided that I need to back up my photos online. I've done this in the past by burning CDs, but those are starting to pile up and they really don't give you a way to organize and find what you're looking for. I've also got them backed up on two different external hard drives, but the same issues of organization and searching apply. So it looks like I'll set up an account, figure out what should be private and public and go from there.

I was intrigued by the St. John's/St. Ben's site and can see a possible application for photos I've taken of some past exhibits. We'll see about playing around with that a bit.

I did a search of photos with the keywords "Sherlock Holmes" (which made some sense as I'm responsible for one of the largest Holmes collections in the world). There were thousands of images, which I was able to cut down a bit by just searching the tags. Even then I had over 900 images. I looked at some of them as a slide show, but realized a bit into the show that it would be better to look at these at work, on a computer that has a little faster connection then my DSL at home. Still, it was interesting and I'll probably explore and search some more. It was also interesting to see photos that were clearly scanned from another (copyrighted) source, with no credit given for the original photographer or rights holder. Seems like there's a bit of an issue there.

I've been playing and exploring for a couple of hours at home, so I think I'll call it quits for the moment and pick it up tomorrow. Besides, I see that I've got 40 items in my RSS reader, so I'll check those out before logging off.