pafa.net

The 2008 Summer Reading photo pool at flickr is growing by leaps and bounds. Tons of great photos of programs, activities, displays and more. Like this great photo from the Newport (OR) Public Library. Take a look at the pool for some fun ideas. And please add your photos too!

p.s. Don’t forget to check out the news on the Summer Reading blog.

How’d I forget flickrCC in the last post? This is another terrific flickr search tool that just searches for Creative Commons licensed flickr photos and has some really handy editing features.

• Search for a keyword and you get a nice mosaic of thumbnails from flickr.
• Pick the one you want and you can select which size you want view. (Larger images tend to bleed off to the right on smaller monitors.)
• My favorite feature is “in house” editing. This gives you a screen where you can add credits to the picture, additional text, a border and more.
• When you’re all done, right click and save to your hard drive or copy and pop it right into your presentation software.

(reminded of this via HeyJude)

Do you use flickr to find photos for presentations, reports and projects? It’s truly a treasure trove of photos, images and screenshots.

You can search for images of types of objects (apples, sailboats, panda bears) or specific places (Mt. Everest, Iguazu Falls) and even photos that evoke a certain emotion or concept (cheerful, speak no evil).

And by using flickr’s advanced searching option and limiting to Creative Commons licensed photos, you’ll find images that you can use without copyright worries.

But if you use flickr for this sort of search often, you’ll soon get tired of plowing through tons of images and downloading photos one by one. This is where some 3rd party tools come in handy.

• flickrstorm - Enter search terms to retrieve photos matching that term. In addition, flickrstorm retrieves a set of related photos as well. Best of all, you can save individual photos to a “photo tray” and download them all to your computer at one go. This is a great time saver. (via Librarian in Black)
• PicLens - This handy browser add-on lets you fly through a set of photos and zoom in on the one’s that look interesting. You’ll still need to select each photo individually for download, but you can preview hundreds of photos in a flash. Works with YouTube, Picasa, Photobucket and other image rich web sites. (via TheShiftedLibrarian)

Summer reading programs have come to an end for the year and I’m having a vision of library staff far and wide relaxing on beaches or mountains this week, recovering from all the activities and programs they held over the summer. Ok, so that’s probably wishful thinking for you all. But well deserved kudos to everyone who participated in these important and fun summer programs.

Maybe I’m too old or maybe I just lived in the wrong places, but we didn’t have summer reading programs where I lived as a kid. I don’t even remember story times at the library. We certainly visited the library often and had lots of story times at home, but looking back I’m sorry not to have experienced all the fun activities that kids get to enjoy today.

Which may be why I’ve loved being part of our NYS summer reading program over the last few years. Granted, it’s only a peripheral part – but I’ve had terrific fun working on the NYS Summer Reading Program web site with the folks from the New York State Library and others all around New York. The site includes lots of games and links to activities for kids of all ages. What a treat to spend hours testing out games and quizzes all in the name of ‘work’.

Some new features of the web site were:

• Be a Super Snooper, a flash based quiz created by The Ivy Group and the NYSL, encouraged students to explore EBSCO’s Searchasaurus.
• Pictures from summer reading activities around NYS appear in a slide show created with Pictobrowser.
• Links to interesting programming ideas, games, activities and other useful web sites streamed into the site using an RSS feed from a del.icio.us account.

RSS feeds from del.icio.us, tehcnorati and flickr helped me keep up on what other libraries were doing with their summer reading programs. Some of those ideas included:

• Librarians around the country (world?) shared photos of their summer reading activities through a Summer Reading Programs flickr group. Currently there are 59 members and over 300 photos from summer reading activities. Loads of good programming ideas and lots of happy summer readers!
• One of the neat programs I learned about through the flickr group was the Mill Valley (CA) Public Library’s Wish You Were Here postcard project. Kids who were traveling received a kit with games and activities. One activity was to send postcards back to the library from their far flung destinations. The postcards were shared on flickr.
• Another terrific idea that I just read about on Helene Blowers’ blog was the “A Library Champion Lives Here” lawn sign project at Louisville Public Library. Kids who read 10 books received a number of prizes, including a “library champion” lawn sign. You have to see the great pictures on their web site and read the director’s comments about the project on Helene’s blog.

I know there were tons of other terrific, innovative ideas out there just waiting to be shared. Some places you can share your ideas and read about what others are doing include:

• YALSA’s “Summer Reading” wiki page
• LibSuccess “Getting Kids to Read” wiki page
• Summer Reading flickr group
• Others??

Hats off to all of you for your creativity, energy and spirit! Job well done! Now take a deep breath before the back to school programs begin!

Yesterday, Yahoo emailed to say that Yahoo Photo accounts would be closing in September. This wasn’t surprising since Yahoo bought flickr some time ago.

Options to transfer photos included flickr, photobucket, Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly and Snapfish. I chose flickr since I’m definitely ‘flickr addicted’ (I didn’t realize that Time Magazine has called flickr “completely addicting”, but I do agree).

(more…)