ATLAS Flickr
The largest project I did was to create an official Flickr page for ATLAS. Now before you tell me “Flickr is so 2008,” would you care to suggest any other social media sites that are specifically designed for archiving and organizing photos? *crickets* I’ve had this conversation way too many times…
At CERN, all articles, reports, and multimedia content are stored on the CERN Document Server. While having a single central server containing everything is fortunate, what is unfortunate is the unwieldy nature of the beast. The server is difficult to navigate even for CERN personnel; it is not plausible for a journalist or member of the general public to use the server for media or information. The ATLAS Communication team tried to address this problem on the ATLAS website Multimedia page. They created folders that linked to preprogrammed Boolean searches of the CERN Document Server, but lack of standardized keywords on the images made the Boolean searches long and complicated (plus unwanted images would sneak in).
This is where Flickr helps. By creating a Flickr, we could:
- Highlight the best images from the document server for journalists
- Caption each photo so the general public could learn about the ATLAS Detector
The other big project I did was format the general ATLAS brochure in eight different languages. When I began my internship with the ATLAS Communication team, the general-information ATLAS brochure given to visitors was only available in English and French. The Comm team had been contacting ATLAS physicists to do translations of the brochure, but no one had yet formatted those translations onto the ATLAS brochure template.
I used InDesign to format each of the different translations, and then corresponded with the ATLAS physicists who did each translation to correct for any last-minute edits before posting the brochures on the CERN Document Server. I not only finished all the translations we currently had, I also found someone to do the Chinese translation in Simplified Chinese as well! Here are all the translations I completed:
Right: Brochure courtesy ATLAS Experiment |
Standardizing keywords Remember in the ATLAS Flickr section when I described the difficulty with Boolean searches because of the lack of standardized keywords? After I finished the Flickr, standardizing keywords became my next task. The Flickr account is great because each photo is clearly labeled with informative captions, but the downside is Flickr only presents a few of all the images in the server. For people wanting quantity over quality, the ATLAS website Multimedia page is a better platform. |
This project was actually a Laurentian activity, but I completed it while I was at CERN. The place where I am getting my master’s, Laurentian University, has students host Student Takeover Days of the university’s Instagram account. I was asked to do a takeover since my internship was just so cool, so on June 12 I created an Instagram Story about my job. The university saved all the clips to create a video, which was then posted on the Laurentian Facebook page.
While July was filled with work on my master’s research, I did take a week vacation to Los Angeles to visit some friends. Stay tuned for my next post on dolphin watching, Disneyland, and more!