We're at the ILA Spring Conference (Region 2). 

Flickr is a social networking tool to sharing photos. It's good for online photo storage, organizing photos, and finding photos in the giant database of photos that is Flickr.

Here's Shelly at the start of her presentation -- a demonstration of how Flickr works from taking the photo to uploading, to tagging, etc.

Social aspects to Flickr:

• Tagging:  bottom up taxonomy: it's by the people for the people and it's not a controlled vocabulary.
• Contacts: Can join "groups".  There's an Idaho Libraries group.  Join it! Add photos to it!
• Comments:  People can comment on your photos. Often, comments may turn into a conversation about an issue.  See examples of photos of library signage.
• Tags. You can highlight a part of a picture. Libraries have used it to show off a display. One note was added noting the title of a book in the display. Regardless of the photo, it can be used to identify details within a photo.

Are all images on Flickr freely available to use? No. Be sure to check the rights. Many of them use the creative commons license, some indicate "some rights reserved" and some might say "all rights reserved." Whenever you are thinking of using a photo you found on Flickr for another, as with any photo, you need to check the rights for it.  Flickr makes it easy to view the rights. There's a link on the photo's page.

RSS & Flickr: 

RSS is behind most the social neworking tools Shelly will talk about today. 
You can have pushed to you via RSS notification when new photos are added to a group or to your own photo set.  You can also have pushed to you when comments are made on photos in your photostream.  Imagine a user that is notified when a new photo is added to your stream.  I think it'd be cool for a school's photostream.

You can create a slideshow of your Flickr photos and then embed them on your own website.  Great to show pictures of people actively enjoying the library and library services on your page. A great advocacy tool!

A Flickr badge is a bit smaller, but sort of similar to the slideshow.  It, too, can be added to the website. When a user clicks on it, they'll be taken to the Flickr photo stream.

How do you find photos?  You can search by keyword from the search box that is available on the main Flickr page.  A search for Nancy Pearl will lead you to a pool of photos by Montana librarians that took photos of their Nancy Pearl action figures in various parts of the state.  A sort of Flat Stanley idea applied to Nancy Pearl.  Keyword searches search tags, descriptions, and titles of photos that have been added to Flickr.