Flickr is the well-known photo sharing site. You can create an account, upload your photos in defined collections, and tag your photos for categorizing and searching. You can sign up for RSS feeds to follow your tags of interest.

The library tag has over 67,000 assigned photos. Flickr offers something new called "clusters" which pull together images from groups of related tags. Take a look at the library clusters.

ALA has a Flickr account.

How can academic libraries make use of Flickr? Some of you may step back even further and ask, Should academic libraries make use of this service? I have wondered this myself. Michael Stephens has compiled a list of 10 More Reasons to Use Flickr in Your Libraries, and while I can relate to some of these, others are not particularly relevant to the mission of academic libraries.

It has occurred to me that our library Web site doesn't include too many photos. Of course, this is not counting our extensive Digital Collections! And I've been pleased to see the photo features in the Dewey Library Blog, for example, the new carpeting. Overall, however, we rarely post photos of the day-to-day life of the libraries, the changes that come to them, feature their nooks and crannies, or document events.

It's not that we're lacking space on our Web server to accomodate photos. We simply aren't using our Web site to feature these types of things very often. It seems to me that many academic library sites are devoted more to matters of permanence regarding a library's resources and services.

This is where Flickr can come in. We can use it to post photos of:

• New developments with our physical space, e.g., Information Commons, digital signage, space reorganizations
• Events, e.g., Library Palooza, author readings, annual symposium, book sales
• Regular occurrences, e.g., tours, reference transactions, computer use in public areas, goings-on in the Interactive Media Center, classroom scenes, etc.
• Existing things we'd like to show off: the beauties of the Dewey Library, the view from the Standish Room, group study rooms in the Science Library

Applying to all these options is the virtue of joining other libraries in showing what we do on a worldwide photo-sharing site. Library 2.0 is about community.