Thing 3: Image Banks

And we're off again!  Thrilled to start a new course - thanks and congratulations to course organisers.

For the Image Banks thing, I decided to take a closer look at Pixabay.  I have never used this image bank before, or frankly even heard of it so I was curious to see how it works and how it compares with Google Images and Flickr.

My first impression was - wow!  This site is a goldmine for really good, vibrant contemporary images and the site is very easy to use.  You can browse by category or do a keyword search and then define your search by orientation, size, colour and whether you are looking for a photograph, drawing, vector graphic or a video (this last one blew my mind altogether!).  I tried lots of different keywords and combinations of keywords and was really impressed with the results.  I did find that there is a certain sameness to images in some categories but that is perhaps unavoidable.

Downloading an image couldn't be easier - just click on the image you want, then click 'download' and you're good to go.  If you are not a registered user you are asked to type in a captcha before you get your image but that's no big deal.  I really like the fact that one can freely use this image bank without having to sign up.

Image by Ohurtsov, Creative Commons Licence CC0 

One thing that disappointed me a little about Pixabay is that it does not contain any old material - early photographs, postcards and suchlike - or if it does I couldn't find it.  In that respect Flickr and Google Images are better.

For those who are interested, below are a few other websites which will allow you to download and use images for non-commercial purposes as long as you acknowledge the original source.  Make sure however to check the copyright status of each item before you use it because not all of them are free from copyright.

Imperial War Museum
National Portrait Gallery, London
US National Library of Medicine's Digital Collections (contains some images to which copyright may apply)
Library of Congress Digital Collections (as above)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (look out for the CC0 icon for images which are free to use)

Thing 23: Making it All Work Together

Social media management tools sound like a brilliant idea for those who have a lot of accounts to manage in a professional capacity.  As social media management is not part of my job description and I only have a few personal accounts which I rarely use I don't think I'll be needing such tools just yet.   However I am glad to know they exist because we live in an ever-changing world in which one can never say never!

Having reached the end of the course my relationship with social media remains ambiguous.  I can see the benefits it can bring in an increasingly competitive world where libraries and archives struggle for their voices to be heard among thousands of others shouting for attention.  It is a fantastic avenue for promoting an event or a project and for spreading information quickly and effectively. However, it is also an incredibly time consuming activity and requires a far greater commitment than I personally would be prepared to give.  There is also a fine but crucial line between getting a message across and shouting for the sake of shouting,  which much of social media seems to comprise.

I would like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to the team who put this course together. It has been a massive learning curve and has kept me firmly out of my comfort zone for the past five months which is always a good thing!  I am still not a great fan of social media but I have a much better understanding of how it works and what it can and cannot do.  I now know what people mean when they talk about Instagram or Twitter or Pinterest and this is a huge step forward.  I have loved reading the blogs of other participants and have been truly impressed by the way people have embraced social media at work.  Some of the Things I've hated, other's I've loved but not one has left me indifferent!  I particularly enjoyed the video and podcasts, and I am actually going to miss writing a blog!  Thank you each and every one of you, and good luck with all your future endeavours.

Image: Social Media Explained by birgerking licensed under CC BY 2.0

Thing 22: Mobile Things

This is going to be my shortest blog ever.  I don't have an iPhone, iPad, smartphone, tablet or any other mobile device so I cannot work on Options 1 or 2.  As regards Option 3, I really, really don't mean to be a smart aleck but if one doesn't own a mobile device what possible use would the 23 Mobile Things course be as it presumes that participants have one?  For anyone who does have a mobile device but does not know how to tap into its social media potential I am sure the course would be a brilliant idea.

Beacon intrigues me!  The idea of a library notifying patrons of overdue books and special events seems like a great idea although I am somewhat weary of the notion of having a mobile device pinging and bleeping as you walk about town bombarding you with information, advertisements and special offers at every shop you pass.  No thanks to that!

I appreciate that mobile devices can be an incredibly versatile tool for accessing and disseminating information however I also feel that they are invasive, pervasive and distracting. It has always baffled me that what goes on in your smartphone seems to be way more interesting than what goes on around you in real life. Perhaps I need to buy one to understand...

Image source: "Creative Commons C & C Cartoon: Passing the Buck" by CA Technologies licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Thing 21: Creating Infographics

Infographics was a completely new concept for me, or so I thought.  Then I realized  that I am in fact familiar with them, only where I work we tend to call them posters.  It also struck me as I was reading through the course notes that we are actually surrounded by infographics - think traffic signs, for example.

Infographics

Infographs seem like a great way of packaging and disseminating information in an easy to grasp format.  It seems to be particularly well suited to making statistics more palatable and explaining hierarchical systems but I would imagine that it can be applied to almost anything.

I converted our reading room rules into an infograph using Easel.ly and here's the (puny) result:
Reading Room Rules.  I confess I found this web tool easy by name but not by nature!  It took me absolutely forever to figure out that background colours, shapes and text boxes are added or changed simply by clicking on what you want and dragging it onto the canvas - duh!  Also, the free version is quite limited in what it can do.  One thing that really frustrated me was that the tool does not allow you to centre or align images at the press of a button.  You can align text within a text box easily enough but if you want the centre the text box itself you have to make an educated guess.  There is a grid that can be activated  which helps a little but it isn't properly aligned with the poster so you still end up more or less guessing.  Also, if you sign up for this web tool, be prepared to be inundated with emails of handy tips and whatnot!

As useful as infographs are, they are incredibly fiddly and time consuming to create.  You'd really want to be a graphic artist to make full use of them.  This, coupled with the fact that the shelf-life of an infograph is probably quite short - today's news is tomorrow's history - leads me to query their applicability to the day to day activities of a library or an archive.

Image: "Creative Commons Great Britain Road Signs" by Ian Britton licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Thing 20: Presentations

I have been using PowerPoint for years and find it a brilliant tool for presentations.  Having said that, I admit that it's not the easiest software to use, particularly if you want to add music or a narrative, or if you want to make a timed presentation in which slides change automatically rather than at the press of a button.  Also, because of the many design and special effects options PowerPoint offers, it's easy to get carried away and create an all-flashing, all-swivelling presentation in which the message gets completely lost!

The most recent PowerPoint presentation I created was for a group of students who were studying to become curators of arts events and wanted to learn how to manage collections of archival nature with limited resources.  This was an awfully interesting challenge as I really had to go back to basics and think simple.  I decided to focus on three different media: paper, photographs and audio-visual recordings.  I included a brief overview of each media, followed by basic handling rules and storage ideas that did not require complex solutions such as climate control or acid-free containers.

Once I had worked out the topics and the general "plot" of the presentation, I began putting it together in PowerPoint.  My personal experience is that people are much more drawn to pictures than they are to text so I tried to come up with catchy, colourful illustrations.  The images also acted as cues for me so that I didn't need a thick wad of notes when giving the presentation.  I interspersed photographs with text but kept the text slides as light as possible, with no more than three or four bullet-pointed lines per slide.  I decided to go for a manual rather than automated slide show which turned out to be a good choice as the course participants were very engaged and asked lots of questions throughout the presentation.

I'm not an expert on using PowerPoint but I have found the following rules of thumb helpful:

• Use images rather than text slides
• If you need to use text, keep it as short and concise as possible.  Nobody wants to read through lines and lines of small print on the screen
• Leave the text slides on for a bit longer to allow people to copy the information if they wish to do so.  Alternatively, provide participants with paper copies of the presentation
• People get tired of looking at the same image for minutes on end so the more images the presentation contains the better - within reason of course!  Ideally, a photographic slide should not stay up for more than half a minute or so.

I was interested in learning about Prezi and Google Slides and would be very keen to experiment with both.  I agree that their templates look more streamlined and contemporary than those of PowerPoint, although if design is your thing it won't be difficult to make PowerPoint look contemporary too.

Image source: "Creative Commons Your Presentation was Confusing and Unpersuasive" by bsoist licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Thing 19: The Legal Side of Things

Copyright restrictions have given me more grey hairs than I care to think about and I really appreciated this Thing which was well written and very informative.  In fact, I'd love a 23 Things course on copyright issues alone!!!  We've often had to grapple with this problem at work and let me tell you there is no thornier or more dangerous ground than copyright law.  It is also an area on which it is very difficult to find clarity as copyright regulations vary not only from country to country but between different forms or works.  For example, depending on the country, copyright length can extend from 0 to 100 years from the death of the creator.  Copyright can also be extended and there is even such a thing as perpetual copyright although thankfully this is extremely rare.

Fair use is another term which is as clear as mud.  There is no clear definition as to what exactly is meant by it and again regulations vary wildly from country to country.  Some copyright owners will haul you into court even in circumstances where the fair use defense would probably succeed with the aim of frightening you badly enough to stop you from using their works for free.  Nice.

Then there is the nightmare of images posted on the Internet.  Let us assume that you find a photograph of a nineteenth-century watercolour uploaded by an art gallery which you want to use on your blog.  The watercolour is well out of copyright and you think you are good to go.  You are not, because the art gallery holds copyright of the photograph they have taken of the out-of-copyright watercolour.  It's enough to give you a splitting headache.

In trying to source "safe" images from the Internet, Creative Commons is a great option.  Some large organisations such as the Imperial War Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in the UK also provide creative licences as long as users adhere to certain basic rules.  However  some websites with allegedly free content should be approached with caution.  One of them is Wikimedia Commons, which does contain images that clearly are covered by copyright but are touted as being freely available.  To be fair, they do flag up questionable content uploaded by contributors, one just has to be vigilant enough to spot it before using the source.

When I first began this course I didn't even think of using images to illustrate my blogs because frankly copyright issues frighten me witless.  After a few dull and colourless blogs I changed my mind and began to search for images guaranteed to be in the public domain or covered by a Creative Commons licence.  Thankfully Google allows you to search for images by their usage rights which saves a lot of grief and trouble.  My rule of thumb is that if your'e not sure about the copyright status of something, stay well away from it and if you are sure, always, always cite your source.  This in fact is a rule I have sadly broken myself as I have provided no source details for any of the images that I've used on my blogs.

To practice what I preach, here are the citations for the two images I've used:

Image 1: "Creative Commons Headache" by openDemocracy licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Image 2: This open Clipart image is from Pixabay and is in the public domain with no attribution required.  However, for those who want to source the image you can find it by following this link: https://pixabay.com/p-156107/?no_redirect

Thing 18: Communicating through Photographs

I was really interested in this Thing as I have always been keen to learn more about Flickr and to find out what exactly Instagram is and does.  I have to confess though that I decided against opening a personal Flickr account as I've opened enough accounts during this course to last me a lifetime and, like many others, I am reluctant to part with all the information the registration requires.  Luckily it is possible to browse and use Flickr to a certain degree without signing up!  In fact, many of the images I have used to illustrate my blogs have been taken from Flickr.

Our library has a Flickr account and we used it extensively in 2013 when the University of Limerick celebrated its 40th anniversary.  We had to organize a photographic exhibition and grappled with literally thousands of images taken during those 40 years, many of which depicted events and people we couldn't identify.  One of our team had the bright idea of uploading some of the images onto Flickr to see if this might yield some information and it did!  We are currently experimenting with the idea of using Flickr for a small exhibition of 70 turn-of-the-century glass plate negatives we purchased at an auction a couple of years ago.  We have photographed the negatives and converted them into positives and are hoping that somebody out there might be able to tell us something about the people featured in the images.  I mean, they were only taken a 120 years ago so somebody out there is bound to recognize a face or two, right?!?

Instagram is a new concept for me.  I can't sign up for it as I don't own a smartphone but I was glad to read up about it as I have heard it mentioned many times but hadn't a clue what it was.  Now I know!  It seems to me to be a pictorial version of Twitter and I'm not quite sure how exactly the two differ from one another as Twitter also allows you to share photographs.  I must confess I see limited application for this in a library because, like Twitter, you have to be at it morning, noon and night for it to have any impact and who has time for that, or that many photos or events to promote?

I find photographs a great way to communicate and to spread information because people are instinctively drawn to images.  As people's attention spans are shortening, long reams of text appeal to few whereas a photograph literally only needs a blink of an eye to take in and can really captivate its audience.  As they say, a picture tells more than a thousand words!

Brown Thomas at UL