Elizabeth B. Thomsen

You send a message to someone and never get a reply and later they tell you they never saw it. Someone claims to have sent you a message, but you never received it. A library user signs up for the library newsletter, but they never get it. Missing messages are like lost socks — they get into the system and then simply disappear. Where do they all go?

Some may genuinely get lost out in the Internet somewhere, and some get trapped in overzealous spam filters. But I think a lot of messages are sent and delivered to e-mail accounts that were never closed but are no longer active. If the accounts were closed, you’d get a bounce message and know there was a problem, but many people these days have several semi-abandoned e-mail accounts that they seldom check anymore and may have forgotten. Systems like Gmail provide so much storage that accounts rarely reach the limit and start bouncing mail, so you can be sending mail to someone for years without realizing that they’re not receiving it.

When colleagues, friends, patrons, anyone seems not to be getting mail from you or your library (including notices from the Millennium, NextReads and other e-mail newsletters, hold notices from OverDrive, etc.) here are the first two things I would do:

1. Ask them for their current e-mail address, and see if it’s the one we’re using.

2. Ask them to check to see if the message is being trapped in their spam filter. They may or may not be able to do this, depending on their e-mail provider, options, etc., and they may need to contact their system administrator for a business or school account or the help system for an account on a site like Gmail or YahooMail.

You can also send a test message to confirm that the address itself is working and that they can receive messages you send individually. The problem is that newsletters, overdue notices and other messages from the library may look like bulk mail to the spam filters and get sent straight to a spam folder or even just deleted.

Most systems will allow users to whitelist the e-mail address of the sender so these messages will be delivered, but you’ll need to provide people with that address. For example, in NOBLE our NextReads newsletters are sent by this address: noble-nextreads@noblenet.org. it’s a good idea to keep a list of all the e-mail addresses that get used by library services so you can help users troubleshoot spam problems.

As for the lost sock problem, sorry, you’re on your own!

The Stoneham Theatre opened its tenth season in September with Studs Terkel’s The Good War : A Musical Collage of World War II. Journalist Studs Terkel was known for his oral histories that reflected the American experience in all of its variety. As they prepared for their production of The Good War, the Stoneham Theatre reached out to local veterans and recorded some of their memories. These short films are on the Stoneham Theatre’s YouTube Channel, and are a lasting record of a few members of the Greatest Generation telling their own stories.

Here’s 1941 Stoneham High School graduate Ethel LaSalle, who served in the Women’s Army Corps:

Many libraries use Flickr to find photographs to add color and visual interest to their blogs and websites. It’s an incredible resource, but one that you have to use with care. You need to check images to make sure any image you want to use has a Creative Commons license, figure out the correct code to link to the photograph on Flickr, and provide credit to the photographer.

ImageCodr is a tool that makes it easy to check the license and get the correct code to link to any size of an image on Flickr, complete with a Creative Commons license and credit link. You just paste in the URL for any Flickr photopage, and get the license information, and an option to preview any available size and generate the code you need for your page. Here’s a sample of what that page looks like:
ImageCodr Sample.

The image below was added to this blog post using ImageCodr. The image will inherit borders, fonts, etc., from your site’s stylesheet, and will probably look just fine as-is. However, if there’s something you don’t like, you can adjust the stylesheet and add a class to the div that encloses the code.

The site does add a link to the ImageCodr site, at the end of the photographer’s credit line. You can find it in the example below by hovering over the the space at the end of my name. This is either a subtle or awkward way to provide a linkback to the ImageCodr site.

• ImageCodr — This is the main page
• ImageCodr: Get Code Page — This link goes directly to the page where you can paste in a Flickr photopage URL
• ImageCodr: Search — The search page makes it easy to search Flickr for images with a Creative Commons license

  by  Elizabeth Thomsen 

There’s an interesting article called From the Web to the Workplace in the current issue of the Boston Phoenix about the importance of social media skills in today’s job market. It highlights some of the adult education classes being offered in the Boston area to help people learn how to use blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites to help them in their job search, and to develop skills using social media in the workplace.
Read the rest of this entry »

Portrait Gallery a service of the Perry-Castañeda Library, University of Texas at Austin, is a collection of pictures of historical figures scanned from books in the public domain. It’s been around for over a decade, and it continues to be a good place to go when you need a picture of Florence Nightingale or Charles Dickens or Joan of Arc, whether you are helping a library user find an image for a project, or looking for something to add to a page on your website.

These are images scanned from books in the public domain, so the images here are all pretty old, and the quality varies depending on the original book source. You won’t find a picture of Martin Luther King, Jr. or Albert Einstein here, and the picture of Winston Churchill shows him as a young man — it’s World War I Churchill, not World War II Churchill. But for pre-20th century artists, authors, composers, explorers, scientists and statesman, it definitely a useful source.

And because these images are all public domain, you can do whatever you want with them — print them out and use them on posters or for craft projects, resize or crop them, colorize them, add text them, or combine them into an artful collage.

They are also fun to play around with using various online editing sites. Go to Big Huge Labs to make a Pop Art Poster or a set of trading cards or a magazine cover. Or go to Picnik where you can add all sorts of special effects, as I did to Marie Antoinette.

The design of this site is simple, elegant and easy to use. The collection is small but useful, and it’s definitely a site worth bookmarking and sharing.

Does your library use Flickr as a way to share their photographs with the public? If so, you probably link to your library’s Flickr photostream and you may be using Flickr badges and individual photos on your blogs and website that link back to Flickr.

But how findable are your library pictures to someone searching on Flickr?

To test this, log out of Flickr, go to their main page (http://www.flickr.com) and try searching for your library. Try all the different ways people are likely to search. For example, if you’re the Smithers Library in Goodtown, Massachusetts, try these searches, and see if you find your library’s pictures on the first page of the search results :

• smithers library goodtown
• goodtown mass public library
• library goodtown ma
• smithers library massachusetts

Academic libraries should do the same thing, trying different combinations of their library and school names.

If your photographs aren’t coming to the top of the search results, check their titles, descriptions and tags. The more information that you add, the more findable your pictures will be. Titles, descriptions and tags are all searched, but tags are the most important.

Be sure that you are using the name of your library as a tag: “Goodtown Public Library”. (Put quotes around a phrase so it gets indexed as a single tag.) Adding the library name as a tag is important even though your Flickr account is probably in the name of the library, because the user name is not included in the regular index and is not found except in a People search.

You should also add the name of your community or school, and consider redundant tagging for state names: Massachusetts, Mass and Ma, for example — people may use any of these forms as search terms. In addition to the tags that you add to every picture, be sure to add other relevant tags to individual pictures, for example : puppets, crafts, Halloween, as well as the names of speakers and performers.

It’s also a good idea to add your library photographs to the Flickr map. You’ll find the Add to your map link on the right, in the Additional Information area. Just click on this, enter the address to find the location where the photograph was taken, and save the location.

Titles, descriptions, tags, map — these are the keys to making your pictures findable on Flickr. If you want to improve yours, you don’t need to edit them one at a time. Go to Organizr, select a batch of photos (or even all of them) and you can add tags to the group and add them all to the map at once.

It’s definitely worth making the effort to make sure your photographs are easy to find on Flick. After all, helping people find stuff is what we do best!