Today we released an upgrade to Picture Australia. Most of the improvements were behind the scenes improvements involving building the framework for features that will be implemented in a few months.  One feature that was implemented was an “Add to del.icio.us” link.  

A “share this” link is nothing new for any news site, blog or current affairs site, in fact for these sites it’s nearly essential to get your content out there and distributed as quickly as possible.  So why is this feature virtually absent from the collection searches of most libraries and museums?  Isn’t it an ideal mechanism for promoting the core content from their collections and giving it the opportunity for further exposure, particularly given the difficulties many museums and libraries face getting their collections indexed by search engines?

Picture Australia currently provides what are essentially “pre-configured” searches on particular topics called trails.  These are designed to be easy and topical introductions into the collections.  With the addition of the “share this” link, now any user can create a group of related images, add their own descriptions, tag it however they like and promote it.  For example, a teacher may want to create a group of images for a class they are teaching, or a historical train society may wish to collate all the references to photographs of trains in their area. Through the use of the del.icio.us API, this user generated trail doesn’t even need to be promoted on del.icio.us, it can be incorporated into any site, displaying it in it’s own context.

I’ve just applied the recent Leopard 10.5.2 update to my iMac at work and noticed that there seems to be some CSS rendering issues with Safari when the text-shadow property is applied to text.

text-shadow: #000 2px 2px 1px; before the 10.5.2 update:

text-shadow: #000 2px 2px 1px; after the 10.5.2 update:

Changing the code back to text-shadow: #000 1px 1px 1px; produces the the same effect as before the update, but now older versions of Safari render the text without the shadow. Is the old version or the new version applying incorrect pixel values?

Flickr have just announced The Commons, a collaboration where the Library of Congress has placed over 3000 images from their collection on Flickr. These images have been selected, based upon them not having any known copyright issues.This is similar to what has been done with Picture Australia here at the National Library, but in reverse. Picture Australia incorporates Flickr images with images from Australian cultural institutions - bringing the masses to the museums. The Commons works in reverse, bringing the museums to the masses. This model opens up huge range of possibilities that just aren’t possible with the current version of Picture Australia. Now a user can easily add tags, comments, notes or add location data, greatly enchancing the value of the collections.It’s currently limited to the Library of Congress, but hopefully more museums, libraries and galleries will be added to the project in the near future.