Thing #6: Image generators

The task for Thing #6 is the use of 3 different image generators: Letterjames, Big Huge Labs and Cooltext. I hadn't heard of any of these before.

Letterjames appears to be a free and simple equivalent to services such as Moonpig.com, allowing you to insert your own text into a variety of stock images, such as this:

I can't see I can see much reason for doing this, full stop, but it's especially irrelevant to me as an archivist because what I don't lack is a selection of images.

As far as I could tell, only one category let you upload your own images (picture-in-picture) which again, I can't see of being much use as the stock images you can load your photo in to (a smartphone, a billboard etc) are unlikely to be of much use to me.

On to Bighugelabs.

At first glance, this website seems to offer more functionality as it allows you to link directly to you flickr account and derive content from there. Again, most of the functions are more geared towards making your own calendars, doing silly things on facebook etc but the most useful tools are the caption generator:



or the mosaic maker, for creating very quick groups of photographs. However the latter was very limited in how it would let you arrange them, and I would be surprised if there weren't others out there with better functionality. Ultimately, this website is very much aimed at the home market and there isn't a great deal of use professionally that I could see with it, other than the caption generator. But it's useful to know about that.

The final website is CoolText.

I'm afraid my heart sunk when I saw this. the website design looks like 1997, the very concept of putting words into exotic fonts all seems a bit old-hat and generally this website looks like something I might have used when I had a geocities homepage. I did have a go with it but couldn't make anything that didn't look deeply, deeply naff. However, this was my laughable attempt.

This isn't a service I'll be using again as I think it's too gimmicky and would very quickly put off a web-savvy audience from spending time on your website.

Thing #5: Creative Commons

Oops, getting a little behind here due to pressures of work but thing #5 is Creative Commons, something I've heard a great deal about but never explored myself. The task this time was to explore the CC website and then choose a licence to apply to our blogs. I chose:


Anna McNally's 23 Things by Anna McNally is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at annamcnally.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://annamcnally.blogspot.com/.

Because if anyone's going to make money out of my blog (ha!), I'd rather it were me than you.

In term of archives, creative commons obviously has huge scope, particularly when looked at in conjunction with Flickr. A large number of archives have used the Creative Commons licence on Flickr [e.g.], which actually has a whole section of its website devoted to it. This is certainly something we could consider with older photographs from the University's archives, although we have to be wary of potential damage to institutional reputation when it comes to encouraging re-use of more recent images. Internally, this could also be a way of providing a bank of images for students to use in their work, to try to encourage more creative usage of the archives, especially by students at the Harrow campus.

I would certainly also argue for applying a creative commons licence to any user guides we publish to the web (which we certainly intend to once our catalogues appear online). There is inevitably going to be a great amount of scholarship going into them, in terms of researching the history of the institution and how it fits into the wider context of London and education provision. We all know that once something is online, you can't stop people copying it and pasting it elsewhere. My hope would be that by showing willing and adding a Creative Commons licence, you are encouraging attribution and citation.

Interesting, the Powerhouse museum have been using software to track what gets copied and pasted from their website and where it ends up. I think this is potentially really interesting as it would allow us to see what kind of geographical and subject-based reach we were having with the archives, but that's something for much further down the line.

Thing #4: Flickr

So, rather belatedly, we come Thing #4, which is Flickr. I meant to write this blog some weeks ago, as I already have 2 accounts on Flickr so only need to report on them, but the combination of work pressures and a holiday (Mexico City, since you ask, and very nice it was too) meant that my report has been delayed until now. Luckily for me, Thing #5 has also been somewhat delayed so I'm not behind. Hurrah!

The first account I opened with Flickr is a personal account which I created in 2007, chiefly to share pictures of my cat, since that's what the internet was invented for. We'd been given a digital camera not long before this and so I started uploading photos regularly. I also returned to my old packets of photos and scanned uploaded old photos of holidays to Berlin. During this time I attended a seminar run by the charismatic Seb Chan of the Powerhouse Museum, who have managed to punch above their weight as a local design museum with strategic use of social media, such as Flickr. This seminar alerted me to possibilities on Flickr beyond just simply posting up photos, such as geo-tgging, which I have since tried to do with all my photographs where possible. Just as I started being quite active on Flickr, including joining groups and commenting on other people's photographs, I reached the upload limit allowed before you have to start paying. At that point I had to consider whether I was going to use it enough to make paying the (admittedly small) annual fee worthwhile, and so far, I haven't done so, and have tended to upload photographs to Facebook instead for sharing with friends, rather than generally online. My experience was that in order to get the most out of Flickr, as with all social media sites, you had to put quite a lot of time and effort in to creating relationships with other people first and this wasn't something I particularly wanted to do with my own photos. I may however reconsider this at a later date.

The second account I manage is the recently created University Archives stream. This was created as part of a social media campaign to try to track down willing victims for the University's oral history project in time for the 175th anniversary. The first photos we posted were class photos which, in the opposite to usual, had the names of all the students but not which class they were. We hope that by posting all the names they might be picked up by online searches and eventually lead us to at least some of the people in the photographs. These photos were also posted on Friends Reunited for the same reason.We then added to these with some 19th century photograpsh of the Polytechnic, and some more recent 1980s photos. I have also been running regular searches across the Flickr site for photos of the University, and marking them as favourites. Through these searches I found several photographs of students and contacted the creator to see if they were interested in being involved in our project. We are now trying to set interview dates with several people who we have contacted via social media. We are also hoping to gain acquisitions of archival material from some of these people, one of whom has the only colour photograph of the swimming pool in 309 Regent Street that we have ever seen!

My vision for the University Archive Flickr site in the long run is three-fold. Firstly it acts as a way for us to get in touch with former students and encourage them to record their memories with us and hopefully to donate any relevant papers they might hold (the archive is particularly looking for ephemera that records the student experience, as a way on enriching the official records that we hold). Secondly it is a way for us to provide an online image bank for staff to search, that we can tag with multiple keywords, to try to encourage staff to use images from the archives in their presentations, whether historical or not. Having searched on the Flickr stream staff could then contact us for a high-resolution version. The archive holds a really rich cache of images that could be much better exploited by staff and students within the university but it's up to us to publicise them and find ways to make them useable beyond their immeadiate historical import. Thirdly, that we can use it as a way of attracting researchers beyond our natural audience into the archive, if used in conjunction with Twitter and a blog. For example, fashion students may be interested in our photographs of women from the 1880s onwards to look at changes in dress, interior design students in some of the fixtures and fittings of the buildings and typography students in scanned pages from some of the Student Union's publications. Although we could do all these things on our own website, putting them onto a larger, shared, site such as Flickr increases the chances of some happening upon one of our images and ultimately boosts the profile of the Archives and the University as a whole.

Thing #3 - RSS

So, Thing #3 of the University of Westminster's 23 Things project is RSS feeds.

I already use RSS feeds to subscribe to blogs, but mostly of the craft/interior design/random persuasion [a big shout out here for the wonderful Home Shopping Spy and Tales of a Junkaholic who cheer up rainy lunchtimes for me]. Although I have several archives blogs bookmarked I can't say I look at them all too frequently, unless prompted by a tweet or suchlike. The one I look at most frequently is Archivalia, as this kills two educational birds with one stone, what with it being in German. I usually end up looking at this on a Tuesday afternoon in preparation for my evening class, and it's always interesting to get a wider European perspective on the profession, even if I only understand 40% of it.

However I've alwasy subscribed to blogs just by putting them in the toolbar of Firefox as this seemed the most obvious way to remind me to look at them. The idea of going to a separate feeder for them seems slightly unnecessary, and at first glance just another example of google dominance. I've learnt from Ellie Murphy's blog that I can organise my feeds into folders on Google reader, which certainly seems appealing - I have folders and sub-folder and sub-sub-folders to organise my internet bookmarks because I'm THAT sad, (plus I've been carting them round with me from computer to computer for about 5 years so most of them probably aren't live anymore), so I shall just say that the Jury's still out. For now I've used Google reader to subscribe to all the archives-related blogs I don't normally look at to see if it encourages me to actually read them. I'll update this blog next week, before embarking on Thing #4, and let you know if it actually works.

Welcome!

This blog is being created as part of the University of Westminster's #23Things project for Library (and Archive) staff to explore the exciting and thrilling world of Web 2.0. As a know-it-all twenty something I expected to have already done everything in this programme but so far, both of the Things we have been asked to do in the programme are new to me.

Thing #1 was the creation of a customised iGoogle page. I have dutifully done this but doubt I'll ever use it again. None of the 'Widgets' available seemed particularly useful to me and I would rather visit individual websites rather than having them all crammed on to one page.

Thing #2 is the creation of this blog and this, my first posting. Again, blogging is something I have never done (although I read a large number). I have tried to agitate for the creation of institutional blogs at several previous workplaces but not met with any success. Since starting at Westminster I have been reasonably active on twitter [as @annamcnally] but haven't yet started a full-blown blog. I have ideas for a blog - don't think I don't have the ideas! - but it seems rather futile until we have the archive catalogues online and some of our material digitised, so that I have something to link to/show you. For the meantime, twitter has suited me better as a means to moan about the process of cataloguing to other like-minded archivists.

But for the next 23 weeks, this blog will be the record of my progress through the 23 Things project.