Is joining in the mainstream finally becoming cool?
I’m not sure how this wasn’t on my radar, but today I learned about a pilot project where the Library of Congress is putting photos on Flickr. For those of you who aren’t librarians, this might not sound like a big deal — even kids mount lots of photos on Flickr and the combined size of the high profile collections LC has added is smaller than many peoples’ personal photo collections.
However, LC’s willingness to work on Flickr represents a quantum leap forward because a key player in the library world is realizing that the ticket to success is to use the Internet like everyone else. Historically, librarians have collected, organized, and physically protected information. While this is a great strategy for physical materials, it’s not good model for resources that require massive technical, staff, and financial resources that we don’t have.
Just as practically all decent sized libraries depend on vendors for collection development, acquisitions, cataloging, and processing when physical resources are concerned, there is nothing wrong with doing the same for electronic resources. Besides, processing photos with Flickr is a heck of a lot easier than it is with CONTENTdm. Oh yeah, you also don’t need to drop $50K to get started and keep paying many thousands each year in maintenance fees.
I have heard fears expressed that this amounts to a loss of control over the information. I think that quite the opposite is the case. So long the information can be extracted (Flickr has a pretty decent API), it could be even safer than we could make it.
Although, if some joker changes the password for the account and gets flattened by a bus, there could be some real headaches. But everyone knows that the best way to keep electronic information safe is to maintain more than one copy.