D-Lib Magazine
November/December 2008

Volume 14 Number 11/12

ISSN 1082-9873

To the Editor

The letter below was received in response to a project briefing that appeared in the September/October 2008 issue of D-Lib Magazine.

To the Editor:

September 23, 2008

I enjoyed the article http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september08/uzwyshyn/09uzwyshyn.html (Repurposing Open Source Software for Agile Digital Image Library Development) by Ray Uzwyshyn, but it would have been nice to have read a pro/con of the WordPress approach vs. a Flickr approach.

Flickr is designed specifically for digital image management. After reading the article, I'm not sure why WordPress was chosen for a photo archive over a photo sharing site like Flickr.

Jim Robertson
Director of University Web Services
New Jersey Institute of Technology
<james.c.robertson@njit.edu>

Below is Ray Uzwyshyn's response to the letter from Jim Robertson.

Thanks for comment, Jim. We chose WordPress because it was widely used and open source; we could repurpose/customize/reverse engineer the entire application to suit our own purposes, as the code of the application was open. We could also host this product on our own servers and make it 'our' product. I have not seen larger or smaller libraries/cultural institutions do much of this yet, and I believe we are one of the first to use 'open source' software in this manner.

Using Flickr, if allowed, as an institutional, stand alone or even shared application would also be another worthy experiment with its own constellation, and I'm glad this article spurred these thoughts.

The hope is that this D-Lib article sparks more dialogue about these types of possibilities and opens other pathways, which I believe it already has, based on some of the other comments I've received as to the ideas expressed in my article. Especially in the current budgetary environment, the more global audience for these types of experiments would be libraries/cultural institutions that are finding it more difficult to manage the ongoing expense of applications such as ContentDM or Digitool and that do not have the financial resources to allocate funds to the human resource expertise needed or for these more expensive products.

If you do try the Flickr experiment with any of your collections, please forward the link for that, as I'd love to see the results.

Ray Uzwyshyn
University of West Florida

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doi:10.1045/november2008-letters