The Universe of Medical Librarianship

Surprisingly, Flickr is one of the few sites that is not blocked from my work’s internet access. I’m sure it will just be a matter of time. I use Flickr frequently for personal use and have incorporated it into my personal blog. It is easy to use and I like the tagging capabilities similar to del.icio.us and other social sites. At first, I didn’t really consider the opportunities to use online photo sharing professionally. However, I now see several possible applications for this in the medical library.

Every year there are several events involving some type of national [fill in the blank] library week/month. Use these events as an opportunity to share pictures to engage your patron base. You could take pictures of your special displays, marketing/outreach events, and various other activities. Also, the library might get involved in taking pictures of CME events or grand rounds. Right now, our hospital video records the grand rounds and I retain a copy and archive a DVD record. But I could see incorporating pictures from the grand rounds and providing a forum on the library blog as a way of providing an opportunity for physicians to continue the discussion and make comments.

I believe the library has unlimited potential use for online photo sharing. Here are some more ideas, or just random thoughts on how to use this service: put together a semi-virtual map of the hospital with pictures; document special projects that other departments are working on; committee meetings or committee events; photos of instructional course on searching health literature; if you are an enormous library use photos as a visual means to help patrons find what they are looking for; maybe your hospital has special/unique equipment like a $2million dollar robotic assistive surgery device, take pictures of it and share.

I think that online photo sharing is mostly an enhancement, value-add tool that could be utilized by libraries. The only thing we are limited by is our creativity (or network restrictions!) so with that, I am very interested in how other libraries are actually using this. Please comment or share your ideas about using online photo sharing in the library.