A Slideshow From EKUArchives @ Flickr

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

These photos are from the 1950s set.

Archives Flickr Project Launched

Back in February our archives set up a Flickr account and started uploading photos to prepare for Alumni Weekend. We’ve talked for a long time about doing some kind of photo identification project to get names on some of the thousands of pictures we have before they can’t be identified.

When the Library of Congress uploaded photos to Flickr, we decided to follow suit. Since February we uploaded, tagged and described over 700 EKU images. We created sets so users could find images of interest more easily, sorting photos by decade and by topic. There are some mistakes that still need to be corrected, it’s easy to flip a negative and scan it backwards. There are some typos and a couple misidentifications, but those problems are easily corrected. We have a couple Flickr problems; for example, you can add a note to some photos, but not all. It is a global setting, so we can’t figure out why it doesn’t always work.

The test came this past weekend. It was Alumni Weekend and we had three opportunities to showcase the project. We made up cards with a direct link so that anyone interested could go straight to our photostream from home.

Friday night before the Scholarship Dinner we set up three laptops with Flickr slideshows and talked to everyone who stopped. Cards were passed out and most people we talked to seemed really interested.

Saturday we set up at the Alumni Breakfast and talked to alumni for several hours before lunch and again in the archives that afternoon. One of the Pioneer Club inductees was the Milestone photographer for the 57 and 58 yearbooks. He was really excited to see some of his photos on Flickr and promised to make as many IDs as he could. Sunday we showcased the project to Friends of the Library.

Tiring weekend, but we got a lot of great feedback, including identifications on several photos we had posted. Before the weekend, our photostream had been viewed about 1150 times, Monday morning that had jumped to 1246 views.

One of our students spent a couple months adding a series of negatives from the 1950s to our photo database and is now scanning some of the late 1950s images to add to Flickr. We chose these years to concentrate on, since most of the alumni we spoke with were there for their 50^th reunion. Later we’ll add more from other decades and see how it goes.

Using Flickr to Help Patrons

I've been working with a woman who is writing a book about Muddy Creek and the Waco community from Civil War to the 1930s. She contacted me to help her get her historic facts straight. Most of the information she needed came from old directories or news articles about the area. Pretty straight forward.

Then she started asking questions about homes on Muddy Creek, and it was starting to sound like she wasn't real familiar with the geography of the area. And a "Tara" style home is really out of place in Waco.

Yesterday after work, I drove by some of the older homes in the area and took quick photos of them, not good photos, but enough that she could see the general style of home. I uploaded the photos to my Flickr account and made a special set for them, so she could find them easily. Finally I placed each of them on a map so she could see how the community fit in relation to the creek and to the main road through the area. It must have really worked to give her a reference point because now she's rewriting.

We'll see what comes next.

#7 Flickr

This is really fun. I like the Explore feature and especially the maps section of that. It was cool to find photos from the Berea Craft Fair last weekend by searching for Berea, Kentucky. I added a couple of my photos to the map also, so if you do a search for Brassfield, Kentucky you'll find a photo of my house on the map. I added a couple more to Soldatna, Alaska also.

#6 Flickr - Midnight - Kenai Lake, Alaska

Midnight - Kenai Lake, Alaska
Originally uploaded by puddleduckz

It was harder to find a photo to blog than it was to take one, I think. There are so many wonderful photos to chose from. I chose this one because I was able to visit the Kenai Peninsula several years ago and loved the majestic beauty of the place.

The colors of the sunset on the mountains in this photo are beautiful. During the summer it never really gets dark. We hiked at midnight looking for wildlife. Our motto was "we can sleep when we get back to Richmond."