week 2.21 (flickr searching)

First rule: Do not search for the term "library" unless you can dedicate the next 8 hours to sleep and are not planning to drive or operate heaving machinery. I was actually hoping to see some sort of assessment project using photography that I could use as an example for a future project here. (I did find a collection of photos from the library assessment conference I attended last year, but I'm not in any of them.) The assessment project was probably not a realistic expectation, but I'm thinking that we should post any assessment pictures we do on Flickr now that I've seen it.

I generally like the intersection of lots and lots of pictures and tags. Most search results -- with some humorous false hits -- are right on the money. It ain't precise but it is fun. For instance, search "UCSC". I also searched "hummingbird" and saw an amazing variety (10s of thousands) of photos like mine. Even searching "hummingbird UCSC arboretum" brings on about a dozen hits.

On the other hand, I didn't see my own pictures. Even though I uploaded my photos last evening (July 2) and reviewed them by most recent first, my pictures don't show up. Hmmmm. It isn't a case of recentness, because I see other July 2nd uploads. I guess I'll double check my tagging or maybe my permissions...

In the meantime, I did some other searching with mixed results. The map business needs rethinking. They can only show about 25 photos per page, so when you browse or even search via maps, you have to page through page after page. Focusing on Santa Cruz means many pages with no SC content for every one that has. I don't get the point. Somehow it should be able to show only pages with photos in that region, no?

One other interesting approach is looking at groups. There are 190 "librarians" groups. (See health alert above.)

Again, I think this is more fun (i.e. social) than practical. Library apps? Still thinking about that.