Flickr is an immensely popular photo sharing website that has developed and incorporated a range of tools and platforms to facilitate sharing and networking and the development of online communities. Curtin University Library has been participating in the “365 Library Days Project: A tool for advocacy and inspiration”, a project hosted on Flickr. This project, the brainchild of Michael Porter, an American librarian, aims to document a year, or 365 photographs’ worth, of images “from in, around or about the library you work in, for and/or with” (http://www.flickr.com/groups/365libs/ ). The resulting set of photos is a valuable record of the library and its activities, enabling their promotion in a popular and widely-used non-library forum. Participation in this project allowed library staff to observe the range of interactions possible on an online social network, and to learn and experiment with a range of Web 2.0 tools.

This paper describes the processes Curtin University Library developed in order to participate in this project. It examines the wide range of issues that arose during the course of the project, such as copyright and licensing, the use of tags to label photographs (Flickr was an early adopter of “tag clouds”), and archiving. One of the hitherto unforeseen issues was the need to obtain permission from individuals (including library staff, students and visitors to the library) before making photographs available on a publicly accessible website that is not directly affiliated with the library or the university.