Heard around the Commons:

• The Field Museum joins the Flickr Commons! Write-ups at Flickr and at LISNews.
• Give Mom a gift for Mother’s Day by donating to the Smithsonian in her name.
• Beyond the search box — an excellent slideshow from Paul Hagon on social media, APIs, and your collections.
• Picture Australia — wow, a very cool interactive site, and they have a Flickr group. Get inspired. Hat tip to Paul!
• New finding aids for April! — The Oregon State University Archives talks up its finding aids at the Northwest Digital Archives (NWDA).
• @nlnz — Learn how the National Library of New Zealand uses Twitter.
• Infomaki goes Open Source! – The New York Public Library’s usability testing tool is now released Open Source under the GNU General Public License.
• Photosynth — The Smithsonian Institution shows off its collections in a new way.
• America on the Move — A Smithsonian online interactive exhibit.
• Photography changes what we think “reality” looks like — From the Smithsonian Photography Initiative, non-camera-centric models for attaining realism.
• Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian — the back story about the props used in the upcoming movie.
• The Library of Congress Experience — A video demonstrating the LOC’s interactive exhibitions that integrate with their website at MyLOC.
• The LOC also picks up a new blogger!
• The Brooklyn Museum is the star of a new commercial.
• Behind-the-scenes — A look at the Powerhouse Museum’s photography studio.
• Stone’s Corner — The State Library of Queensland, Australia, provides insight into the history of this Brisbane suburb.

Go Visit!

• Now Open: Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video at the Brooklyn Museum.
• Throughout May: Asian Pacific American Heritage Month at the Smithsonian Institution.
• Throughout May: Jewish American Heritage Month at the Library of Congress.
• May 9: Gallery of Modern Art May Highlights Tour at the National Galleries of Scotland
• Opening May 9: Not a Cornfield, a photography/video installation at the George Eastman House. Catch a video of artist Lauren Bon and the installation team on the “Earth Pillow” piece. Also, Don McCullin — in England, images by the famed British photographer, and Animalism, “contemporary media responses to our complex and sometimes uncomfortable relationship with the animal world.”
• May 9 & 10: Mom’s Weekend at Oregon State University!
• May 13: Water: Sustaining Our Blue Planet at the Field Museum, a talk with Jeffrey Sachs and Peter Annin.

Your Friday Fun:

-hat tip to george for this one!

Paul Hagon is the mashup developer whose amazing mashups of Google Maps and images from the Commons were featured on Indicommons recently.

Could you tell me more about yourself?

My first coding experiences were back in high school when I learned the basics of programming on a VIC-20 and a TRS-80. This sparked an interest in computers, but my real passion is in design. I studied Industrial Design at university.  I was still involved with computers then, but mostly doing a lot of CAD drawings, renderings, Illustrator and Photoshop work (this was back in the days of Photoshop 1.0). After graduating I worked in the furniture industry for 7 years before moving into the web world.

I always had a fascination about how people interact with things. Industrial design was perfect for feeding that fascination — it has an extremely personal scale of interacting with an object.  Designing for the web is so similar, it’s interaction at a personal level.

When the internet came on the scene in the mid ’90s, I read lots of websites and read lots of books, taught myself HTML and never looked back.  I moved out of the furniture world and into the world of cultural institutions when I got a job as a web developer with the Australian War Memorial (who recently joined Flickr Commons). Since 2006 I’ve been a web developer at the National Library of Australia.

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