CC image courtesy of Lights Out Photos on flickr

Last week I (and many others) spent a lot of time documenting the Internet Librarian conference, photos, tweets, blog posts, facebook updates. Did the act of digitally documenting the events change anything? Did the process of lifestreaming change my (and others) behavior, perception of what was happening and memories of it. Will we remember it better or worse?

A recent article from CNN Do digital diaries mess up your brain? looks at the effects of lifestreaming.  Just knowing others are watching you may change the types of experiences you choose to have, from books to movies to where you eat and what you wear.

“If we have experiences with an eye toward the expectation that in the next five minutes, we’re going to tweet them, we may choose difference experiences to have, ones that we can talk about rather than ones we have an interest in,” he said.

It also detaches you from what’s happening at the moment. If you’re focused on tweeting what’s happening, you’re not fully engage in what’s happening.

But recording everything you do takes people out of the “here and now,” psychologists say. Constant documenting may make people less thoughtful about and engaged in what they’re doing because they are focused on the recording process, Schwartz said.

What does that do to our actual memories of events? Memories are shaky at best even when you’re completely focused. If you’re only half there, will you remember it later without the aid of digital documentation? What would I rather have a memory of something or documentation of it to prove I was there? What if that documentation goes away?

It makes me think, I do want to be living and experiencing life to the fullest. Does this mean I’ll put down the camera, the cell phone, the laptop? I don’t know. Probably not at conferences, but I’ll be thinking hard about doing it in other areas of my life. What good is lifestreaming an experience if I’m not fully enjoying it?Similar Posts:

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Yes, the absolute correct way! I previously asked how you credit a CC photo from Flickr. Since then I’ve been doing my research and here is the results – The correct way to credit a photo.

You need to follow the guidelines set by the license. I’m only going to address attribution. According to Creative Commons you need to:

1. keep intact any copyright notices for the Work
2. credit the author, licensor and/or other parties (such as a wiki or journal) in the manner they specify;
3. include the title of the Work
4. the URL for the work if applicable
5. If you are making a derivative word or adaptation, in addition to the above, you need to identify that your work is a derivative work i.e., “This is a Finnish translation of the [original work] by [author].” or “Screenplay based on [original work] by [author].”

My addition/suggestion

• Let the author know. Leave a comment on the image, send them an email, a Flickrmail whatever.  Flickr doesn’t provide trackbacks, if you don’t tell them you used it they may never know.  People like to know when others are using their works or citing them.  Plus, it’s just nice.

That is a lot to include. So what does a perfect attribution look like? How do you include all that information?

Example 1. If you grab an image from Flickr you can choose the “Blog This” option which will give you the title, the author, and links to both images and user profile. It’s missing the information about the Creative Commons license and a link.

The monkeys are here!

Originally uploaded by Librarian by Day

blog this test

Example 2. You can download the image from Flickr. This one is missing everything, it’s up to you to provide the author, title the work, provide the CC license and links.

Example 3. Lately I’ve been formatting mine  like this. The photo links back to the photo on Flickr and the caption indicates is a CC photo and gives the name of the photographer. I also leave a comment on the photo on Flickr thanking them for using a CC license and letting them know I’ve used it in a blog post with a subtle link to the post.

CC Image courtesy of Librarian by Day on Flickr

I’ve also seen bloggers use a footnote to the post saying Photo Credit: Librarian by Day, with “Librarian by Day” linked to the image or profile. What are we all still missing? The title, the Creative Commons License used and links to the CC and author profile

Example 4. You can use imagecodr.org to create it.  You put in the URL of the photo it automatically does the rest!  The alt text contains the author title and credits Flickr. The image links to Flickr. It adds the CC license image and author adds appropriate links.

by  Librarian by Day

My problem with this one is I can’t get both the image and the text to align right in WordPress. WP doesn’t allow  linking in captions.  The information underneath isn’t technically a caption.  Maybe someone with more coding savvy than me can figure it out.

Example 5. A perfect attribution would look like this:

This photo, “The monkeys are here!” is copyright (c) 2009 Librarian by Day and made available under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 license

Ok that’s a perfect attribution, it’s a bit more work. Does it need to go directly under the photo? I don’t know.

Good enough?

This may be a case where good enough works. I can’t recall ever seeing a Flickr photo with a perfect attribution and the world isn’t falling apart. I’m just not sure if what I consider good enough is what you consider good enough. There is a big difference between the bare minimum and good enough.  To me, my current way, example 2, is good enough.  It includes the name, indicates CC license, links to the original image and I leave a comment on the image letting the author know.

Will you use the perfect attribution? If not what is good enough for you?

Read more:

• Best Practices for Marking Content with CC Licensing: Users
• Best Practices for Marking Content with CC Licensing: Creators
• How do I properly attribute a Creative Commons licensed work?

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• How do you attribute Creative Commons Flickr photos?
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photo by yoheiyamashita on Flickr

Update 9/28/2009  Please see this post on the correct way to attribute photos, it includes example of an perfect attribution.

I get most of the great photos I use in my blog posts from the Creative Commons licensed pictures on Flickr.  Most of these request attribution and I’ve seen it done many different way.  Some people just make the photo link back to the original on Flickr (my old method). Some give credit and/or a link below the photo, some give credit at the end of the blog post. There doesn’t seem to be a hard fast rule on the correct way to do it.

Recently I started thinking I should also live a comment on the photo thanking them, telling them I used it and linking to the post so they have a record of where.  Mostly because if someone were using my photos I would appreciate knowing they used it and where.  But then I got worried it might look as if I were promoting my blog, so I asked on Twitter

when you use a CC flickr picture in a blog post do you leave a comment on that photo letting the person know?

The response I got varied from Flickr should enable trackbacks (great idea) to never thought of it to I send the person a private message.

So how do you handle crediting the Creative Commons photos you use?

If you want to read up on Flickr & CC:

• Gaming the Creative Commons for Profit
• Creative Commons Clarification Badly Needed, and Not Just in the Help Section
• Give Each Blog Post a Pretty Face With Flickr

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I came across this cool tool from Idée on Circulation this morning.  It allows you to search Flickr Creative Commons liscensed photos (or photos from Alamy) by clicking on the color or colors you want the photos to have.  You then click on the thumbnail to get the photo and the liscense information.  

The only down side is the collage doesn’t list the url of the photos it generates so you can’t really use it as a whole and follow the attribution part of CC.Similar Posts:

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• How to attribute a Creative Commons photo from Flickr
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Earlier this month I attended a Mobius conferernce session about vodcasting in libraries.  I came back all inspired and fired up.  I don’t think our patrons are ready for vodcasting yet but that didn’t stop me from making videos.  Even better is was perfect timing for Flickr allowing 90 second videos that are much better quality than YouTube.

Our reference staff has been talking about proactive reference, empowering patrons to use some of the online tools themselves.  So I started making videos of how to do some basics and posted them on MRRL’s flickr account.   Right now they’re getting a lot of views on Flickr, and we’re getting a wiki set up that is linked from all the OPAC pages so the videos are always available to the patrons from the online catalog 

[flickr video=2625853778]

Does your library have a Flickr account yet?  What other video topics could you cover for your patrons?Similar Posts:

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The first Online Picture Sharing class was last week and the second is this week, we only have 15 laptops for the patrons to use so we have to have multiple sessions.  I choose to focus on Flickr vs one of the many other online picture sharing sites inpart because MRRL has a Flickr account and because of the Social aspects of Flickr. 

I’ve started working on the next set of classes, one of them being Online Safety, this is a hard one for me because it’s important to me to teach people to be safe without making them feel like the internet is full of dangers.   Any suggestions?Similar Posts:

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MRRL now has a Self Checkout Machine (SCOM) and staff made videos to help patrons understand how to use it. I got a hold of them and put them on both MRRL’s Flickr and Youtube accounts. The flickr video is so much clearer, of course we’re paying for a pro account, but I can’t see why we’d bother with YouTube anymore. Am I missing something? What do you think?

[flickr video=2544538607]

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