Thing 4. Photosharing with Flicr

First of all, I don't have as yet a digital camera so I feel I am a little behind in understanding digital photos and all that can be done with them...I think I will start this assignment then by exploring flickr to see what photos others have either produced themselves or uploaded from other sources....and I have to say, I am pretty impressed! Seems every professional or near professional has put some stuff out there; extremely good quality pictures to look through, and very creative and scary how good they are.

For me, I am just learning how to upload some selections I found which interest me...first I thought I would upload the pictures directly from flicr, which maybe would be fast, that is, if I could figure out if it's even possible to do this direct route, but I failed at that, couldn't find a way, so instead, I ended up saving them first to my hard drive, where it was easy to find and upload to this blog using the Blogger edit screen....

Okay, my first question to library lovers out there....so who is this mystery man I have successfully placed over on the right side??? He is somehow related to libraries through one of his many works...but which one and why?

Yes, he is a writer...but what is his name, and what famous work did he write that had anything to do with libraries??? Concerning the work he wrote, I bet most of you haven't read it, unless, of course, you went to library school, where it is such a dense classic on the philosophical meaning of what the ultimate library of the imagination would be like, that only some obscure place like a library school would ever think to put it on the reading list...

Okay, since I know you gave up since he just looks like my uncle from Duluth...Shocker boy will just tell you....his name is Jorge Louis Borges, an Argentine writer, and really before becoming a writer, was also a whiz library cataloger, and the work he famously wrote concerning libraries is a short story called "The Library of Babel." In this story, the entire universe consists only of one infinite-sized library, made up of endlessly connected hexagonal rooms, each filled with nothing but book shelves containing books of words describing every idea , every thought, every doodle and musing, every possible thought or fantasy, that anyone or anybody, in any circumstance, could ever, ever, possibly conceive!! Now that kind of library had to have had quite a large collection budget, don't you think??!!

But back to flicr, and to illustrate this concept from the story, I tried to find photos that would visually show this ultimate library of his in pretty pictures, but that was where flicr failed me. No professional or talented amateur bothered to produce a photo that exactly fit the bill...so I did a hunt on flicr to find a picture that might be close enough...and here's what I found.....

This is an actual hexagonal library!!! Now picture it filling the entire universe and we have Borges' Library of Babel....found on flicr, and it is a real library not found, believe me, in Duluth or anywhere else in Minnesota....so what is this picture??? I credit someone named Jaqi B. for giving us this one...it is, in case you don't recognize it...the great State Library of Minsk, Belarus, formerly of the old USSR!!! Bless you Jaqi B, you came through!....a perfect hex library....I will include Jaqi's picture, photo adventurer and world traveler, from her collection, as a tribute to her for this very rare find (and because uploading any pictures found on flicr is so much fun)....