365 Library Days on Flickr

As you may have heard, Michael “Libraryman” Porter, my Flickr presentation co-conspirator and groovy guy, has hatched a new scheme: 365 Library Days, a photo group and project on Flickr.

The deal is that your library joins the group and then contributes the equivalent of one photo every day for a year. I gather that the Platonic Ideal of a 365 is to upload one photo per day, every day, that was taken on that day. Michael knows that kind of every day commitment is too much for most of us, so he’s suggested that you still aim for a total of 365 photos in 365 days, but that you relax the upload schedule. Maybe you aim to upload seven photos a week, but don’t worry if you shot all seven on the same day. The main thing is to make it a habit, do it regularly, and post current photos of what is currently going on in your library.

Well, I asked a few of my colleagues and they agreed with me that it sounds like fun, so count Tutt Library in. We haven’t started yet, but by the end of the week, we’ll get rolling. I expect it will be fun, I expect I will regret this decision a few times over the year, and I expect that next April I’ll be looking back over a great photographic survey of what we were up to over the preceding year.

(Aside: I notice that right now we have 367 photos in our photostream, taken over the last two years. So even if we post no other photos this year, it will double the size of our collection.)

(Another aside: I see that the 365 Library Days group now has 245 photos after just two days. Soon, I suppose the group will be getting 365+ photos per day.)

The League of Awesomeness Internship

This new project dovetails nicely with something else I have been planning to write about: the League of Awesomeness Internship.

If you watched Ze Frank’s The Show for the year it was going, you know what I’m talking about. Ze Frank produced a short video program five times a week for a year. (If you never saw it, you might want to find some decent bandwidth and the popular shows page. If you get hooked, I’ll see you in a year.)

There was a running thing on The Show that Ze was doing the videos as part of an internship for The League of Awesomeness. So I have begun to think about these commitments to do some creative act in public as League of Awesomeness internships.

Internet troubadour Jonathan Coulton’s Thing a Week, where he recorded a song for a podcast every week for a year, was certainly a League of Awesomeness internship (hell, just the Flickr song (or try this YouTube link) alone makes him Awesome in my book). This Library 365 thing may be less intense than recording a song a week or five videos a week, but it’s the same kind of idea. I’d say that 5 Weeks to a Social Library was a mini-LOA-internship for the participants (and a maxi-LOA-internship for the organizers!).

This is a powerful idea: instead of saying “I really should record some more songs” or “take more photos” or “figure out what this social software stuff is all about,” League of Awesomeness interns commit to doing more than they think they might be able to do and they do it in public. Over time, they run out of ideas, learn to make decisions quickly, and are forced to tap hidden stores of creativity.