Elizabeth B. Thomsen

Add Flickr Pictures to Your Site Using ImageCodr

Elizabeth Thomsen — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:28:26 +0000

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 [...]

Social Media and the Workplace

Elizabeth Thomsen — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 17:02:08 +0000

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 [...]

Perry-Castañeda Library’s Portrait Gallery

Elizabeth Thomsen — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 22:17:50 +0000

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 [...]

Is Your Library Findable on Flickr?

Elizabeth Thomsen — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 04:26:37 +0000

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 [...]

Fun Fake Stamps from Your Photos

Elizabeth Thomsen — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 03:35:45 +0000

If you were designing a postage stamp for your library, what would it look like? What about historic buildings and other notable places within your community, wouldn’t it be fun to see them featured on postage stamps? The United States Postal Service does allow you to put your photographs on real postage stamps through their [...]

Create A Graph

Elizabeth Thomsen — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 03:59:04 +0000

The NCES Kids’ Zone website has a simple but powerful tool called Create A Graph that makes it easy to create makes several different kinds of graphs and charts, with lots of options for effects, colors and file formats including PDF, JPG, SVG and more. There are several samples here to play around with [...]

SearchMe Redesign

Elizabeth Thomsen — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:56:46 +0000

Update from TechCrunch: SearchMe May Go Offline Tomorrow (Updated: Offline Now) — “The company needs a new round of financing or a quick acquisition to stay online, but so far neither are happening…Bottom line, The site may go offline at least temporarily tomorrow if a buyer does not step in (Update: The site now redirects [...]

MCCLPHEI Presentation: Emerging Technologies

Elizabeth Thomsen — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:53:51 +0000

[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 [...]

Illustrated Newspapers on Flickr

Elizabeth Thomsen — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:47:49 +0000

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 [...]

DCPL Then and Now Photo Contest

Elizabeth Thomsen — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 16:27:01 +0000

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 [...]

Great Article: Reading Dickens Four Ways

Elizabeth Thomsen — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 04:37:43 +0000

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 — [...]

Adding Links to Facebook

Elizabeth Thomsen — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:46:06 +0000

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: In most cases, what it takes from the page is just fine, and you don’t want to edit it. And probably shouldn’t, [...]