Powerhouse Museum Photo Library
Considering that the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney is devoted to science and design, it’s no surprise that it has embraced Web 2.0 technology such as blogs and social bookmarking.
The photo library is just one of the four specialist research services offered by the museum, which also include a research library, museum archive and conservation. Blogs represent the public face of the museum’s specialized research services and a separate one is maintained for each of these areas. These are easily accessed from the site’s navigational pane, and are grouped under the Collection and Research section.
Like the Asian Film Archive blog, which belongs to another special library that I’ll be looking at, the Powerhouse Museum Photo Library blog is fully integrated into the website of its governing institution.
The concept behind the Photo of the Day blog is, as the title suggests, a daily showcase of images from the Photo Library collection. Yes, that’s right, this means that the library has committed to updating the blog every single day! A neat feature of the blog is the ShareThis widget attached to each posting, which enables users to conveniently share the images through popular social bookmarking and networking tools like Facebook, Delicious, Twitter, and Stumbleupon.
Accompanying each image is a write-up on the context in which it was taken, the photographer and any copyright restrictions. The library strives to make their images available to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.1 license, so those that are free for use have been tagged as such. Many of these licensed photos are also shared through the Photo Library’s Images Services Flickr account. A separate account is kept for images with “no known Copyright” and users are encouraged to contribute tags to be incorporated into the library’s digital image database.
Stimulating further user participation, the Photo Library has started several Flickr groups; user submitted photos are sometimes shown on the blog and in the gallery. It’s exactly this element of reciprocity that I find to be really exciting about the concept of Library 2.0; the use of social bookmarking here clearly compliments the collection development and services offered by the Photo Library.
I love pretty much everything about this blog – needless to say, I think it’s a great model of how blogging can successfully enhance and generate awareness for special libraries. Surprisingly the RSS feed for the blog is difficult to find; I only stumbled upon this by clicking on the comments section of an entry. Especially because the blog is updated on a daily basis, my suggestion for improving this already fantastic blog would be to make it easier for users to subscribe via RSS.
