Flickr

I was trying to do the initiative thing, so I set up a Flickr account for our library. The reception it got from the staff was somewhat lukewarm, who did see it as a good alternative for storage away from the intranet drives that get emptied every so often, and I was trying to push the promotional tool aspect also.

But there was a big question about privacy for customers and such who might appear in our photos, especially from the Childrens' Librarian, who was worried about the pedophile aspect and the fact she only gets verbal agreement to photograph students and kids. Law is that people don't really get a say about being photographed in a public place, but still.

Sigh.

Has anyone else experienced something similar? Do you have a Flickr for your library?

Tags: Flickr, photographs

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Tom Gerichhausen on March 28, 2007 at 4:16pm

Hello, in the Netherlands the rules about putting people on photo's are strict. I think Flickr is not that save to store a huge amount of photo's for a long period. Maybe it's an idea to store them on external HD??

But on the other hand it can be promotional to build your own page at flickr. In that way people can easily visit the page and view the photo's.

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Permalink Reply by Ken Fujiuchi on March 29, 2007 at 5:33pm

Its a tough call. We take photos of events at our Rooftop Poetry Events here:

http://www.buffalostate.edu/library/rooftop/past/

and we haven't gotten any complaints yet. This is a little different from Flickr, but you can always manage the photos on your Flickr account with the privacy settings. You can keep new photos public, while making the others only available to "friends/family", so that only registered Flickr users that you invite to your contacts list can see them. You can even create a Flickr group for your library, where only members you invite can see the photos, but also allow others to submit photos as well.

My only other advice is to either reduce image quality (saves space too) so that its just blurry enough to hide the details, but still good enough to see what's going on in the picture. If its a SLR/DSLR, I might suggest playing with depth of field, with focus of the image on a object, and let everything else in the picture be a touch out of focus. Also slow shutter speed can make for some interesting photos with motion.

Just my two cents.

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Permalink Reply by Jeff Scott on March 29, 2007 at 6:13pm

The Casa Grande Library has a flickr http://flickr.com/photos/casagrandelibrary Most pictures of kids are from the back or unclear. Anything that we have put on Flickr with kids are from the local newspaper. It is a public library, but I could understand concerns. I would simply say that I don't want my child's picture taken and most people would respect that. If you are there and pictures are taken, its best to state that. We have not received any complaints and flickr is great to post pictures to and save your intranet space. Photobucket is great too, no storage limit really. I set up the library's photo album and photo news using an embed tag from flickr. That got a pretty good response from staff who wanted to see more library pictures on our website. http://cglibrary.org

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Permalink Reply by elibrarian on March 29, 2007 at 10:31pm

I agree with you it's a touchy subject. For our library, we started off with something which everyone agreed as 'safe materials' such as library display, local area history. Encourage your staff to play with it (I will be more than happy to lend our work digital camera to the staff members who are interested to try out flickr/blog)

IMHO, Web 2.0 technologies may not be suitable for all libraries and the only way to find out what suit us best is to try them out =)

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Permalink Reply by pipipianica on April 9, 2007 at 9:25pm

hi everyone, thanks very much for your replies. still have a bit of work to do with regards to flickr, but at least these are workable solutions to the privacy considerations. thanks again!