a librarian’s worst nightmare?

Posted in librarians | Monday, December 10th, 2007 | 4 Comments »
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I don’t know about you, but my worst nightmare is more along the lines of someone vomiting (or worse!) in the overnight book drop, but Slate has an article about Yahoo Answers and how librarians hate it. Of course the writer doesn’t seem to have talked to any librarians, he just likes to rail against the wisdom of crowds — with some valid points, certainly — and make fun of stupid answers on YA which is of coruse the opposite of what any decent librarian would do. There is a lively back and forth in the disucssion section which is hard to follow and hard to find but if the topic is as near and dear to your heart as it is to mine, I suggest you dig it out. I commented. [thanks alexandra]

Flickr/Yahoo & Library collaboration

Posted in access | Monday, January 30th, 2006 | 2 Comments »
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Coming on the heels of the recent news about Google’s foray into international government entanglement, here’s some encouraging news perhaps. Flickr is working with the National Library of Australia to “build a image bank with over a million images to be managed by the National Library of Australia.” This seems to not be an archival process but a way for the library to use what Flickr does best, upload, store and allow tagging and categorization of lots of digial images, combined with the mission and purpose of the library. I’m not sure how the library is managing these photos, but it will be fun to see contemporary photos in the PictureAustralia database. I saw a demo of this project when I was in Australia last year, it’s a pretty great resource. [thanks mom]