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Teaching, Vol 8, No. 2 x The Teaching Librarian Volume 8/No. 2 15 As an example, see the community photo album at [http://www.WECDSB.on.ca]. Go to "Our community" and view the photo album index and pages. A FINAL CAUTION It's great to share your images and school activi- ties on the web but do consider the viewing audi- ence. There are a lot of people out there cruising the web with whom you would rather not link. As you are placing these images on a school web site: • DO follow your Board's web page guidelines. • DO NOT provide identifying details on the web site. The photo caption should talk about the activity you are highlighting ("story time is fun"), not name the visible faces. • NEVER link a first and last name to a child without the specific permission of the parent/guardian to do so (e.g., award winners listed in press releases). • DO INFORM staff / parent volunteers that you plan to use their image. • We have a standard parental release form authorizing the use of the child's image or work in a public format (school newsletter, web site, board produced lit- erature, videos, etc.) which should be on file at the school for every child. Keep a couple of copies of these release forms with the digital camera too. It's a lot easier with guests to note on the permission slip that this is for picture 02 and 03 and get it signed on the spot than it is to try and backtrack afterward. Enjoy sharing your library program with the whole community! n n n 5. Cropping and Re-sizing Images and the Use of Thumbnails Learn to use the crop tool. It's your best friend! Just the simple act of selecting the interesting part of the image, and cropping out all the extraneous background can greatly add to the impact of the finished picture. Plan to fill the frame with the main image ( what you originally took the picture of). Crop (trim) the edges, the overabundant sky, the dull or out of focus background filler. 6. Interleaving the Image (a more advanced technique) The browser will wait until it has the whole image downloaded before displaying any of it... therefore for bigger images (3X5 or larger), you should select the option to "interleave" the image. This is like taking a paper cutter and slicing the picture into lots of slim horizontal slices. These get saved as a set of pictures and trigger a stag- gered load. The end result is an image that starts to appear quickly, and grows as it downloads getting pro- gressively longer and sharper as the download progresses. Does this display the entire picture faster? No. In fact it can actually take slightly longer to down- load the full image as the interleaving commands add some size overhead but the end user per- ceives that it is far faster. They see something happening continuously! 7. Web Page Layout: Numbers of Images per Page Obviously, the more images you put on a page, the longer it will be before the full page displays. If you have a whole "photo album" of images to share, then create a set of thumbnails (small crops of each picture) and display them in a table with the choice to click on each one to see its full size. Even with a table full of thumbnails, remember that the total size of the page is important. Create link pages of your photo album with just 6 to 8 thumbnails and a short write-up or caption per page. Let the user browse through your "pages" and enjoy! (TL)2: Diane Bédard is at the Learning Materials Resource Centre, Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board. She is President of OLA's Ontario Library and Information Technology Association for 2001. <diane_bedard@wecdsb.on.ca>