We're on Flickr!!

A while back we had an excellent intern, Eli, work on developing a shortened walking tour for the LHS. He did a GREAT job producing both an online product and a printed product.

In order to put the version online and on our website, he had to host some pictures on Flickr.
At least, I think that's what had to happen. The reason Eli was doing this work is because he was MUCH more skilled at it than me. But he broke it down for me and told me the details and showed me our Flickr site. Which looked great in my opinion.

At the time, I thought "hmmm, this has some real potential, but how can we use it?"

So I've sort of let that sit for a while and thought about some other things. Like an exhibit. And public programming. And budgeting. And strategic planning. And you know, the regular stuff at the Museum.

So fast forward almost a year later and we're thinking about our current exhibit. Snapshots in Time: Our Community in 1910 and 2010 is supposed to capture images from today and encourage people to realize that THEIR story is the LAUREL story.

Part of that effort involves letting people continually contribute to the exhibit. So we have spaces in the exhibit where people can make their own self-portraits, vote on an issue, and leave a picture.

But then we're faced with the next question: Who actually has printed pictures anymore?

Large sigh.

Okay, so what can we do to collect digital images. We could have them emailed to us and then upload them on our website. Which takes a lot of effort and time and in the end the pictures can't be commented on or really manipulated.

Then I remembered Flickr and how great it looked from Eli's work. So we're back to Flickr. We've decided to post pictures from the exhibit that people have contributed to Flickr. There are some on Flickr that never made it into our exhibit. And some that are definitely up in our galleries.

And a lot of interesting, fun pictures both from 1910 and 2010. But remember, we're still collecting for 2010. So if you have an image, feel free to bring it by the Museum and put it on our wall.

Or email it to me (director@laurelhistoricalsociety.org) and we can post it to our flickr page.

Oh and this isn't the only way we'll continue collecting images from 2010. We'll be making a special effort this summer. Details will be coming soon!