Thing #4: Flickr

I'm the type of person who doesn't take a camera on vacation as I want to look at things with my eyes and not through a photo lens. (I also don't like having to label photos and throw them into an album--no, I don't own a digital camera).

However, after viewing the CommonCraft video and poking around in Flickr, I think Flickr is the solution to the problem of organizing and storing photos. I bet it would even be fun to set up photo sets on Flickr.

I decided to set up a Flickr account, so I borrowed my son's digital camera, and took a few pictures of my library. Here they are.

The Skinny_Stacks photo is a very narrow aisle where you have to suck in your gut in order to retrieve an item. (Actually, the stacks are 2X2 shelving units, and you can rotate them from a wider aisle that isn't in the picture.) Some days, just for fun, I go down the skinny stacks. It's a bit claustrophobic.



These white binders are our State of the Industry (SOI) reports. We save special issues of journals that have industry rankings, best new products, top manufacturers, etc.


Here's the oldest book in our collection: History of Corn Milling, Vol. 1, Handstones, Slave & Cattle Mills, by Richard Bennett and John Elton.
London: Simpkin, Marshall and Company Ltd, 1898. I need to send it to our company archives, but for now, I'm hanging onto it.


I'm working on getting our entire collection cataloged (we've been working off of a paper shelflist and are moving to an automated system). I've found some interesting things in the stacks, like an ancient copy of a Cutter table. Inside was a copy of Charles Cutter's instructions on how to use the tables, including this catchy first sentence: "It has been found convenient by librarians to arrange some classes of books alphabetically…” and later, this comment: “Some persons are apprehensive that this decimal arrangement will be hard to use, or at least hard to teach to stupid assistants and (when the public are allowed to go to the shelves) to a public unwilling to take the trouble to comprehend..."



I think I'll use Flickr to set up a virtual tour of my library. We're planning a grand roll-out when the cataloging project is completed. Having a virtual library tour via Flickr on our website would be a nice accompaniment for the roll-out celebration.

Parting thoughts/questions: Even though I tried to use the layout tools, it wasn't easy to format the photos and text (I wound up copying and pasting the html code into the right spots in my blog). Does anyone have advice or places to look for help on formatting images and text within a blog?