Elizabeth B. Thomsen

[Links from my MCCLPHEI Presentation]

Words

• Flickr Tags — Showing the most popular tags right now and all-time
• Wordle — A simple but powerful tool for creating word clouds from any text or list of words
• Name Voyager — An interactive chart for exploring the popularity of baby names

Search

• SearchMe — Visual search engine
• WindowShop — Visual interface to Amazon’s new releases
• Tagnautica — Visual search of Flickr tags
• ColrPickr — Search Flickr by color
• Multicolr — Search Flickr by color combinations
• TinEye — Reverse image search engine
• YouTube You Choose — Example of voice-to-text indexing
• Koogle — “Kosher Google” search for Orthodox Jews

Video

• Living Room Candidate — The Living Room Candidate website is a beautifully-designed online exhibit from the Museum of the Moving Image, showcasing presidential campaign commercials from 1952 to 2008. You can explore by year and read a short article about each candidate’s television strategy, or browse by type of commercial (biographical, fear, real people, etc.) or by issue (corruption, taxes, war, etc.)
• Prelinger Archives — A collection of short public service, sponsored and educational films
• JoVE — Peer-reviewed Journal of Visualized Experiments
• Truveo — Powerful video search engine that goes way beyond YouTube

Structured Data

• Google Quotes — Do a Google News search on a prominent person, and look for a Quotes link in the sidebar
• Wolfram Alpha — Computational engine
• Google Squared — Creates a grid of structured information pulled from many sources
• Powerset — Provides structured results from Wikipedia articles

Mapping and 3D

• Shorpy New York Photo Map — Google Maps showing location of historical images
• The World Is Not Flat — 3D tools like Google Earth and Google Sketch-Up make it possible for anyone to explore and create in three dimensions

Illustrated Newspaper Supplements — The Library of Congress has added a great new set to their Flickr Commons account: cover pages from the New York Tribune illustrated supplements, beginning with the year 1909. These images are from the Chronicling America website, and each image on Flickr has a link to the image page on that site where you can use image-zooming tools or download a PDF.

These large illustrated covers provide an interesting view of historic events and everyday life. The visual format looks surprisingly modern, and, like today’s graphic novels, these illustrated newspapers provided an alternative way to look at the world. In the words of the Library of Congress: “The heavily illustrated supplement sections became the most widely read sections of the papers and provided a great opportunity to attract new customers. The daily life, art, entertainment, politics, and world events displayed in their pages captured the imagination of a curious public.”

The images on Flickr are just a small sample of what readers will find on the Chronicling America site, which includes collections of newspapers from several states.

One of the images in the Flickr collection has a local history connection for our area — it describes President William Howard Taft’s selection of a Summer White House in Beverly, Massachusetts. This is the Stetson Cottage at the site that is now Lynch Park. This house has connections to two NOBLE communities — in 1910, Marie Evans, the owner of the property, cut the house in half and sent it by barge across the harbor to Marblehead.

Stetson Cottage on Woodbury Beach — Image in the NOBLE Digital Library

President Taft’s choice of a summer home at Beverly, Mass.

The DC Public Library is using Flickr to run an interesting photography contest. Photographers choose any of the historic photographs from the DCPL Flickr Commons collection, take a new photograph of the same location, and upload it to the DC Then and Now group which the library set up for the contest. Participants can just upload the new picture and add a link to the old, stitch the old and new together, or remix the images in any way they want, encouraging creativity.

The new images must be given a Creative Commons license, which means that the library (or anyone else) will be able to use them within the generous conditions of the license. (There are four versions of the Creative Commons license on Flickr — all require attribution to the photographer, and differ in whether they restrict commercial use and allow for derivative works.)

Participants differ in how they interpret the idea of then-and-now pictures. Some entries are a totally different view of the building or object shown in the original picture, while others try to capture exactly the same view as the original.

My favorite photographs here are the ones by Flickr user tvol,Timothy Vollmer. In addition to adding his matching images to the group, he also adds a three-part image showing his process, and explains his process:

“These three-photo sets show the process I used in taking photographs for the DCPL Labs DC Then & Now group. The top photo is the original from the DCPL Commons set, which I loaded onto my iPhone so I’d know which perspective to shoot. The middle photo is the location of the original represented through Google Street View (also from iPhone). The final photo is the updated photograph I took, captured with a Nikon d90. “

Any library could do a contest like this with their historical images, whether those images are on Flickr, your website or an online digital archive. Using a Flickr group to collect the entries makes it easy for both the participants and the library, and it means that all images will be public and free for others to enjoy. Participants would only need to sign up for a free Flickr account to participate, and any Flickr user can start a group. This is a great way to engage the community in your local history collection!

Links

• Photo Contest: DC Then & Now — Contest announcement on the DC Labs Blog, with more information on the contest rules, deadline and prizes
• DCPL on Flickr Commons — The library’s photostream
• DC Then & Now — The Flickr group for the contest

Great article by Ann Kirschner in the June 12 edition of The Chronicle Review on the various ways we read today :

Reading Dickens Four Ways — “How ‘Little Dorrit’ fares in multiple text formats”

When Ann Kirschner’s book group decided to read “Little Dorrit,” she has to decide how she wants to read it — in book form, on the Kindle, on the iPhone or as an audiobook. Each format has its advantages and disadvantages, as she discovers, and each has its passionate advocates.

“That’s the worst accusation: that I am not a serious reader. Not guilty! I love books as much as anybody. But I love reading more. It is the sustained and individual encounter with ideas and stories that is so bewitching. If new formats allow us to have more of those, let us welcome and learn from them.”

When you post a link on Facebook, whether it’s on your own profile or on your library’s page, Facebook takes the title and a snippet of text to display, which looks like this:

Read the rest of this entry »

This video shows several different celebrities speaking out in support of the New York Public Library. They reminisce about their childhood library visits and the role the library played in their lives, and talk about why libraries are essential to building strong communities.

I found Malcolm Gladwell’s words particularly moving: “My last book ‘Outliers’ describes success in terms of opportunities, and one of those opportunities is a library…Whenever I hear the words that libraries are being cut back, I feel like people’s lives are being cut back in a very real way.”

Most of us don’t have access to celebrities like Barbara Walters, Nora Ephron, Amy Tan and Bette Midler, but any library could make a similar video featuring local celebrities and members of your own community who could be equally eloquent and effective in delivering the message.