Blue Electrode

Our Special Collections and main scanning lab have been restricted to limited access due to renovations in the library, but of course we’re still available online! And over the summer, we became a lot more social! Social media, that is. The icons and links for all of our social media accounts now appear on the Digital Library home page, but here’s a breakdown of the types of things posted to these accounts:

Twitter: Random selections from our collections as well as interesting news related to digital libraries.

Facebook: News and highlights from the Digital Library.

Tumblr: We had a Tumblr account before, but it was languishing for a while, so I’m refreshing it now. This is for slightly longer posts than Twitter or Facebook, but still shorter than here on the Blue Electrode blog, hence the Tumblr is called Blue Electrode Lite.

Flickr: Again we’ve had Flickr for a while now and I have been updating it (semi)regularly, but I just wanted to link to it again with our other social media accounts. I pick random pages from inside longer books, so this is a good way to discover some interesting content you might not know about unless you paged through an entire volume. You can also interact with the images here by adding tags, notes, or comments.

While I’m here, I’ll also mention that we have a Facebook and Twitter for our open source digital library administration application, VuDL, as well.

All of these accounts are curated by me (Laura) and I’ve noted that on all of the account profiles. I like people to know there’s a friendly face behind the institutional/product name on the accounts!

Please follow along with one or more of these accounts and feel free to ask questions or post comments! (The same applies right here on the Blue Electrode, too, of course!) And if I can’t answer your question myself, I’ll find someone who can. Social media is for conversations, so I would love to hear from you!

Join the conversation! [image source]

The Digital Library is now on Flickr! I created our account in June and have since added 85 images (and counting!).

Most of the images come from our collections on the Digital Library and I’ve created image sets that mirror some of the main collections there, as well as two new collections: Adverts and Scenes. As you might guess, the Adverts set contains advertisements from the pages of some of the books in our Digital Library. I’ve pulled the ones that struck me as interesting or noteworthy in some way.

The Scenes set contains Flickr-exclusive images that don’t fit into any of our regular collections. These will mainly be random photos I take while wandering around campus photographing trees.

The majority of these images are all available on the Digital Library, of course, but our Flickr account provides another point of access and highlights some of the interesting images that are easy to miss if you don’t look through every page of every item on the Digital Library. In addition, Flickr allows you to interact with our images by adding notes, tags, and comments.

Come check us out! I know I’m having fun finding images to post there, so hopefully you’ll find something new and interesting, too!