Library of Congress on Flickr

Here’s a neat experiment in Web 2.0:  The Library of Congress has opened a Flickr account and started putting up historical photographs.   As they said in the blog post announcing it, they’re hoping to tackle two challenges with this project:

how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata…

::shudder:: metadata ::shudder::   Sorry, having a traumatic library school flashback here.

The LOC also has created, in partnership with Flickr, The Commons,  a pilot program that hopes to be a model for other museums/libraries/cultural institutions to share their digital collections.

Blue 2.0 starts today

One of the cool things about my job is that I get to constantly learn new things and play around with technology.

One of the hard things about my job is that I need to constantly learn new things and play around with technology.

All librarians, even ones that have no interest in technology or ones that don’t deal with the public,  are in the same boat.   It’s the nature of the job, always has been.  However, in the past decade, the technological leaps have made keeping up almost impossible.

However, librarians and library systems are banding together to help each other over the technological hurdle.   The Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenberg County in North Carolina was a trailblazer in this with their Learning 2.0 staff training program.   This program has been copied and adapted all over the country…most recently, as of this morning, by the University of Kentucky Libraries and it’s Blue 2.0 program.

Full disclosure: I’m on the working group that’s planning and operating it.  We’ve been working on it since Late October/Early November and I’m pretty excited to see it finally launching today.  Still, although I’m one of the organizers,  I’m not quite an “expert” on all the modules, so I’m going to be participating along with 90+ UK Libraries faculty and staff.  I’ll be blogging my experiences (part of the requirements of the program) here.