I just noticed this button at the bottom of the Birmingham Public Library site, which links to a webpage full of mini-video tours of the central downtown branch and five of the Birmingham branches.It’s powered by Alabama360.com, so you have the ability to zoom, pause, pan and tilt.
Some of the older tours are powered by MapWing which pinpoints still images rather than allowing you to pan through a panoramic shot.
The Linn Henley Research Library tours don’t do the murals justice. It’s just one of those things best seen in person.
JPG Magazine broke out with a bold content generation plan a couple of years ago: bring a “photo enthusiast” print magazine, they would scour the internet for the best of the best non-professional images and reprint them in their pages. It’s always been a fun magazine to flip through. As innovative as this approach was, their business model was not so much, as they relied on ad sales to support the printed product.
In my opinion they made a VERY good run at it and I am sad that they are closing up shop. You can get the full run-down from their blog. At a minimum, they are one great case-study for publishers everywhere trying to divine the future of print media. I just wish Laura and crew could have made it.
I ran across these photos and story of the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository on a few blogs last week. The photos have gotten every comment from “how beautiful” to “I can’t believe some @#$%&! would let this happen”.
Basically it’s a huge building of books that have just been left to rot. It’s all really kind of depressing. All the photos are here while the post explaining why and who forgot about all these books is here. How sad.
We have plugged the Birmingham’s 2008 Big Read Project Mockingbird a few times already. Now organziers are flexing the ir Web 2.0 muscles and asking for help from the immensley productive Magic City Flickr Group. Basically, the call went out for photos of events, people or anything that related to project Mockingbird or the book To Kill a Mockingbird.
So if you have any pics sitting around, just upload them to any Flickr account and tag them “projectmockingbird”, so the libraries can parse them to their sites via widgets.
Books, Publishing and Birmingham
