News from Jan 17, 2008

Michael Scott, Assistant Director

The first forum in the Sustainable Rural Communities program, co-sponsored by SELS and the U of MN Experiment in Rural Cooperation (ERC) was held January 15, 2008 at the Preston Public Library.  The topic was Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) and the speaker was Mary Laeger-Hagemeister, U of MN Regional Extension Educator.  ABCD uses the premise that community members should identify the capacities and skills of its citizens, organizations, institutions, physical, and financial resources to help them understand the wealth of assets within their own community. 

We had a small but engaged audience who ventured out on a cold January evening in Minnesota.  Many assets in the local community were identified by the group and the message taken away from the program was to look at what a community HAS rather that what a community doesn't have.  The program was excellent; stay tuned for information about how you can view this program on the Web. 

Click here for pix of the program.

I'd want to encourage anyone who has an interest in the sustainability of our rural communities to attend any of the upcoming programs. Click here for the schedule.

Mary Beth Sancomb-Moran, Community Information Librarian

Oh, now....this is just cool.  The Library of Congress has started a Flickr page, and as you might imagine, the photos are amazing.  The folks at C|Net blogged the story:

The good news is the Library of Congress is putting 3,000 images up at Flickr. The bad news is they're relying on us to tag them all.

In a pilot project announced Wednesday, the government archive put the public-domain, copyright-free photos on the Library of Congress Flickr page. That's just a small fraction of 14 million photos and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, according to the archive's blog, but hey, it's a pilot project.

If you're like me, you recognize the value of tagged photos when you're looking for a particular shot but can't remember when or where you took it, or when you want to sift photos to zero in only those with something like "birthday" and "grandma." But also if you're like me, you probably tag your photos only intermittently.

So it's a safe bet that the Library of Congress photos won't immediately sport a huge range of highly descriptive tags. But I'm inclined to see the glass as well over half full: having the photos easily available is great, and I can't imagine the government would pay on its own to fund some dedicated tagging effort.

It's not only interesting that the Library has chosen to put their photos on Flickr, but are relying on tagging by viewers to classify them.