In July last year I wrote about blogging platforms being used for a variety of information management purposes. I gave a few examples and CW reminded us of Casey Bisson’s use of WordPress to “unsuck” the OPAC and build a library catalogue. Since then, the WPopac has become Scriblio, and it is now being used for an archive of photographs from the Brown Manufacturing Company in New Hampshire.

Beyond Brown Paper is worth having a look at.  It is a multi-phased project of Plymouth State University’s Lamson Library, the Center for University Archives & Special Collections, Karl Drerup Art Gallery and the Center for Rural Partnerships.

Image posts feature thumbnails and links to related images, commenting is enabled and categories are used to feature portraits, indoor and outdoor shots and group photographs.

There is a plugin (by Peter Binkley and Mike Giarlo) for WordPress that provides records for posts in OAI-Dublin Core, MODS, SRW-Dublin Core, MARCXML and RSS. I don’t know if  Beyond Brown Paper is using this plugin, but it would lend some additional publishing functionality to enable a WordPress image collection like this to integrate with other systems.  I imagine it could be used to publish oai output for a service like Picture Australia.