Edinburgh City Libraries – ‘Tales of one city’. How to sort your web2.0 stuff and run a simple joined up social media campaign

Nice story from Phil Bradley’s weblog describing how Edinburgh City Libraries have got thier web2.0 stuff well together under one simple branding ‘Tales of one City’.

Consists of:
Blog , Flickr pictures, Twitter feed, delicious tags, wiki, YouTube channel .

‘VoiceThread’ tool for group conversation

Voicethread is a useful, fun and simple tool for playing around with images, text and audio in ways to add and share meaning(s) with others.

They describe it as follows:

:A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways – using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) – and share them with anyone they wish. A VoiceThread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world.

At the moment it is free and you can see it would be very useful for any of the educational style, participatory community/local history projects that museums do so well. Also, for teachers, museum educationalists or kids just playing around.

The future for the Library – Library of Congress and Flickr?

Interesting report by UCL saying, as an article in the Times Higher Education puts it, “Researchers’ web use could make libraries redundant”

It certainly warns of the possibilities for the Internet to offer more choice to researchers, in more flexible ways then the physical library. But what a call to action this should be! The Libraries and archives are rich with content that can help in so many contexts – learning, research, exploration, serendipity, interrogation, story telling etc.

I love libraries, for me, they can be cultural spaces and at their best are as vital as the best galleries or museums. (I am lucky to live in Brighton whose library is beautiful and vital).

Maybe they could take a lesson from The Library of Congress in the US who have just done a fabulous project with Flickr. Described as “Your opportunity to contribute to describing the world’s public photo collections”.

What is interesting here is the historical imagery, that previously was hard to find, is made available to a huge existing online community. The photographic community within Flickr already engage in higher quality tagging and user generated content and Flickr already has a lot of ’similar’ contemporary content with which these historical images can be linked. This puts both sets of images into different contexts.

Of course, the other important part of the equation is that the Flickr’s API opens up interesting possibilities for combining the info into other projects or services. Innovation at its best.