Week Seven - Reflect Activity

Photo sharing - can it play a role in personal or personal professional life?

This week students were required to reflect on one of three questions posted to Blackboard. I selected the following:

Can you see an application for photo sharing in your personal life? Or your personal professional life? Why or why not?

At first I thought, apart from being able to share photos with friends or tag them in photos I'd taken, there wasn't any practical application of photo sharing. However, upon further reflection and by looking at the idea of photo sharing as an application within a professional context, I was able to see some possibilities. As I'm studying to work in the library and information management sector there are a number of ways photo sharing could be used meaningfully within the workplace. In order to best demonstrate the possible ways in which photo sharing could benefit the LIS sector, I drew table-like diagrams. Links to concepts I made mention of are listed to the right of the images. Click on the image to enlarge.

 - Although it wasn't mentioned the table to the right, the idea of sharing historical images was drawn from libraries who already have Flickr accounts (for e.g. the State Library of New South Wales).

- The respective Flickr diagrams mentioned can be found here and here. While diagrams and models aren't technically photos, through using a photo sharing platform like Flickr the creators are able to both manage the copyright and share their work.

- A definition of the GLAM concept can be found here. 

- Gold Coast Libraries Facebook page. 

When finding out about the LIS sector, collaboration and commons I also stumbled across this terrific SlideShare presentation by the National Copyright Unit:

Australian GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) and Creative Commons from National Copyright Unit, SCSEEC

After reviewing the possibilities of photo sharing in a professional context, I think in my personal life I'd eventually like to contribute to sites like Wikipedia through providing them with any quality work I produce through a creative commons license; it would be a great way to share knowledge and to encourage others to build on ideas.