sharing labor images
Here's another little project I've been working on lately (though perhaps not worthy of front page treatment at this point) - I'm polishing off a BA in Labor Studies at UMass at the ripe age of 49 and as part of my "senior project" I'm working on three proposed Drupal installations.
The first two will be used to store and index PDF archives of Labor Notes and The Labor Page (its Boston equivalent, presently in hibernation).
The third site is a bit more interesting. I'd like to help set up a central respository for people to share links to online labor images, including any known copyright info, for use in (primarily) web sites and multimedia.
I've made an attempt at creating - well, mostly stealing - a taxonomy for sorting contributed images. I'd be interested to hear what CoDers think of the format and of the project in general.
At the Labor Notes conference, there was discussion of using flickr.com as a repository for labor images. But I see that they're a subsidiary of Yahoo, which makes me wonder if the service is going to be free forever.
- Bill Bumpus's blog
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Great ideas
Bill, are you familiar with Creative Commons licensing? It would be perfect for such a thing.
The latest version of Drupal now has the ability to "free" tag nodes. It could be a very powerful tool. In addition to problems of flickr being overly commercial, it has a lengthy user registration process.
I don't see how having
I don't see how having images inside drupal would work, could you point me to a site that does it?
And I don't quite understand the "overly commercial" view of flickr.com. As far as it remaining no cost, yahoo has been able to keep its email free...
Mostly what I was trying to get across is that there already is an active community of labor images at flickr with no sign in to view: http://www.flickr.com/groups/union/
Here's the first one I found
See http://www.robshouse.net/image It's kind of a poor example because the css is messed up on it and there is some overlapping text (in Firefox). But that can be fixed.
I haven't used Flickr in over a year, since they were taken over by yahoo. But my understanding is the user registration process is a hassle. Also, there are limits to the number of photos you can upload. You don't have total control over the environment.
People have also integrated Drupal with the Flickr API. So you wouldn't have to abandon Flickr. You could use both.
I think it's important for a collaborative site like this to have its own identity.
thanks for the example
but it doesn't really help me understand what you and Bill are thinking about. I do understand the identiy point you made. I am just not a drupal fan such as you two! You know me, wiki wiki.
As far as flickr, I have used it for a while now, never ran into the upper limit of photos uploaded and I don't have a problem logging in, maybe that is an issue with new folks after the yahoo purchase.
More Bill's idea
But I think it's just a simple repository of images. They could all be tagged, just like with Flickr.
Speaking of wikis and Drupal: someone is working on a hardcore wiki module for Drupal. I haven't played around with it but plan to. See http://drupal.org/node/53517
a very rough draft
of what I had in mind is at www.cpcs.umb.edu/labor_notes/?q=laborimages.
Rather than using the images module, I though it would make sense to create a Drupal "taxonomy" to store the images.
Also, rather than keeping the images themselves onsite, my thought was that each node would contain a link to the image that would open in a separate window. That way if copyright questions should come up, we wouldn't be storing or displaying the image on the site itself, just providing the address.
The nodes would look something like this. It occurred to me that the "flexinode" module might be useful in providing a better interface for things like the address, image size, and other variables that don't lend themselves to tagging.
Flexinode is no good
Flexinode is going to be phased out in the next version or two. I would stay away from it.
For classifying images, I think it makes more sense to use Drupal's "folksonomy" tag system build into Drupal 4.7.
The idea to store images offsite is interesting. I would think that would be something of last resort since sites and images come and go. I think it would be better to have them on site where possible.
copyrights
I don't see a problem with storing the images onsite if they're original or if we're pretty sure they're public domain/creative commons. But there are others we won't really know about, and it seems like it would be safer not to actually copy them onto the site...
I'm not suggesting we copy them
Just saying that it would be better to encourage others to post them.