#10 Flickr

Being only an occasional photographer and quite content to keep these on my own PC I have never been a big user of Flickr - though it's occasionally useful for work purposes, eg checking out the good, the bad and the ugly of library signage. Having just played around with it a bit though, the Blog This function is a really good example of web applications playing nicely with each other.

I love what the National Library is doing with Flickr as a way of sourcing new items for the pictures collection - though the flipside is that I'm never terribly impressed with getting a whole stack of Flickr results in a Pictures Australia search, would have thought that this would just be restricted to the photos acquired rather than the whole Flickr group. Also nice to see NLA getting some of their own photographic collections out into Flickr, though I wonder how many people use Flickr as a starting point for searching for images compared with, say, Google - would it give these items more exposure to load the metadata into Google and link back to Picture Australia or individual library sites? The problem with Flickr is that you've actually got to upload the pictures as well... So even though it's a great idea to get our digital collections 'in the flow' of most users' web environments I'm not sure that adding copies of digital images to Flickr is likely to be a very cost effective technique...