Flickr

I love my Flickr account.  I've had it for a little over a year now and it is very easy to use and fun to scroll through.  It was a bit of a bummer when I realized for what I wanted to do I'd need to pay...but after that bump in the road I figured out how much fun it can/would be.

For research, the answer is pretty simply.  With an ability to search hundreds of thousands of photos for all over the world, it provides a way to search photo content for posters, projects, papers, anything!  Plus with Flickr's settings, almost anything is allowed use as long as you give credit to where it came from.  I've noticed lately that Google image has cracked down a bit on copy/paste abilities, but with Flickr you can find amazing photographs of almost anywhere you can image. 

Also, Flickr allows you to contact other users so if you want to be extra careful about copy right laws, you can always contact the person for permission. 

Another great research tool would be the ability to search what some place looks like.  Say your reading a novel set in a rural village in China.  Most of us have never been lucky enough to have visited China and the descriptions may seem very...well...foreign.  By searching posted pictures of real like action in places such as a rural village in China, we have an ability to gain better understanding of the subject someone is studying. 

Flickr and other photo sharing sites are another way to connect and share our experiences.  Friends who have gotten married have posted all their photos to a Flickr so that guests who weren't able to attend can still see all the great moments. 

The world is getting smaller.  Now, even though you may have never ridden on the back of an elephant, or swam in an African waterfall, or been up close an personal with deep sea creatures, photo sharing sites let you experience what other's have all over the world.     

The joys of Facebook

When Facebook first popped into the scene I was still in undergrad about to finish my first year.  I heavily resisted falling into 'the trend' and waited a long time to join.  It wasn't until a couple years later when I went overseas that I joined Facebook as a way to keep in touch with everyone back in the U.S. 

Now, some five or so years later I quickly realize how much of an impact joining Facebook has had on my life.  When I joined it was college students only.  I thought nothing of posting a picture or status update that might have had pictures or comments about the night before.  I've stripped my profile of almost everything that I don't want the world to see....but it haunts me (especially as a children's services person) that anything I ever posted, was tagged in, or commented on is still out there.  You can never delete anything really. 

So now when I have patron's come in and ask me to help them set up a Facebook account, or when parent's of my story time kids ask if I'm on Facebook I am constantly reminded of how un-private our private lives are these days.  What once started as a hilarious way for college students to connect and share crazy experiences with has turned into an open book into everything you never wanted anyone to know. 

I helped a women who speaks mostly Spanish and very little English the other day set up an account on Facebook.  It took several minutes to communicate the difference between posting to the 'wall' and sending a message.  I had to stop her when I noticed she was about to send some private info through the wall postings.  She comes in almost every night I work, she's even written down my schedule, to ask more questions about the inner workings of Facebook.  We haven't gotten to Twitter yet...but I know it is coming. 

Twitter is the new way to round about research.  When you see every one's thoughts on a world event or topic, the lines between your own thoughts and thoughts of other's blur.  Before having an informed opinion meant doing lots of research, now it just means jumping onto Twitter and seeing what everyone else has said about an event. 

So now as I build an awesome group of kids and parents that come every week to my events and get more involved with things on campus and join faculty committee's I daily edited what has been snowballing on my profiles.  Social networking sites are like all good things in life...you can't live with them.  But you can't live without them.  Because of Facebook I've built a really good relationship with a lot of patron's and gained their confidence in my abilities.  I've advanced my standing among faculty members by joining groups they've created, and extended the reach of my little library branch in the community by making people aware of events I hold by posting about them.  But at the same time they know I have two older sisters, that my brother in law loves to cook, and that I have the world's most adorable four year old nephew.  All very private things that catch me off guard when they ask how they're all doing during Saturday story times.  It makes me feel like I have to work a hundred times harder to appear professional when they've seen pictures of my in my pajamas. 

Googling...

The other day I was reading an article by one of Google's creators, Brin, who talked about why they felt Google would be a new craze.  This was written well before Google took off and became the thing we all know it as today.  Back then Google had a humble start, Brin was excited at all the issues with exsiting hypertext search engines that Google could solve.  The humorious thing is, that as Google grew, all of the problems it was created to solve, it has taken on as well.  Brin saw Google as a way to fix the heavily commerical influenced exsisting search engines.  He saw it as a way to cut down on costs associated with human managed search engines.  And he saw it as a way to make reliable and quailty results happen faster. 

Part of Brin's expectations for Google has held true.  It offers services such as Google maps, which I have found life saving.  It also offers handy ways to find basic information or pop culture info extremely fast.  But Brin was a little off if he thought it would solve search engines trying to influence users with commercial information.  Input anything and the first one million hits are almost 90 percent commercial.  And it didn't exactly make searches more reliable as far as academic research goes.  Instead Google has become the number one reason libraries are still needed.  So in a way we should backhanded thank Brin and his fellow creators. 

Google may have made our lives easier in many ways; it has cut down the number of wrong turns I make, made sharing documents easier, helped locate thousands of useful pieces of information, but in the long run Google speaks to why it's important that libraries stay current with technology (so we know how to help patrons) and separate from the technology (image if we only had Google to answer all reference or item related questions! It'd take forever!)