Friday, December 17, 2010

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.

Friday, December 10, 2010

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:

Creative Commons Licence
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.