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:

• We Want to Know What You Think
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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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http://www.flickr.com/commons/

Brooklyn Museum – contributing to the commons caused flickr account to get flooded with comments, also posting photos that they “think” are something posting to flickr confirms or discredit it

Can no longer respond to all comments, just completely got overwhelmed, it was no longer the small user community they knew and loved, were very close to leaving

Goes beyond community working with their stuff, they are also helping with our workload What is the best way to add images to existing sets?

Ask the question of the commons community, and you’ll get an answer

Library of Congress Power commoners –

do historical research and get really involved History detectives provide support to their statements by linking to sources online

People provide personal memories of photos Historical context discussions Then and now photos

New York Public Library – Flickr puts photos in space more accessible than they currently are, Failed in the creation of community – they framed it as a technology project,

No know copyright restrictions, other rights like privacy

If someone posted a question who was going to answers? The subject specialist, got some irate responses from curators saying how could they do this with their stuff? They are now trying to engage where they can, rather than thinking about it as a distribution channel for photos or technology look at it as community engagement

Smithsonian – considered it more of a social experiment, than a technology issues

Wide range of subject matter means communicating with widely different community of users

What you need is a small group of like minded people at your institution to get it started, once it takes off (quick victory project) and the positive feedback starts other will be lining up to participate

Questions

One of the problems is that flickr is created for individual users, when you use it for a institution you have one password that everyone has, that might not be the greatest thing Flickr allow strikeouts so handy for corrections Copyright isn’t the only issue – if there is a picture of a person, that person or descendants might have some rights to the photoSimilar Posts:

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Here is the thing, most of us don’t have that much time to spend online, networking, learning, creating content, whatever.  I remember Helene Blowers talking about taking 15 minutes each day to read blogs, to stay informed.  I gave myself 30.  There are only so many hours in the day, and so many of them are taken up with other things, so really it doesn’t leave me much time to spend online (we can’t all be Robert Scoble).  So sacrifices are made.  I know where I spend my 30 each morning.  

But I want to know where do you spend yours?  You’ve got 30 minutes today, only 30 minutes where will you spend it?

[polldaddy poll=1357900]
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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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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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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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[flickr video=2544538607]

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I’ll be showing this in my class for the public later this year!Similar Posts:

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