With our increasing reliance on electronic record keeping, especially online records, it makes a lot of sense to consider the use of virtual bookplates for those items which would normally have a printed label affixed within the book:

• An item with a Virtual Bookplate from the University of Florida Smathers Libraries, which utilizes an 856 MARC field link to the virtual bookplate.
• A search box on their Donor web page gives donors (and others) an easy way to locate the donated items.
• The virtual bookplate for the item.
• A presentation on Slideshare (14 slides) providing an overview of their process.

This strikes me as an especially effective way to both recognize and promote donors.  The only real technical requirements are graphics software to create and edit the bookplate design, and the web space to store the finished graphics.  Neither should be a problem for any library willing to spend the time required to get the project rolling.

The people who created the above-linked presentation are conducting a survey on library practices on bookplates.

found via AcqNet-L

TinEye is an image search engine with a twist:  you provide it with an image, and it returns a list of websites utilizing that image.

I can quickly think of a few really good uses of this service:

• You have an image that you downloaded sometime in the past, but you don’t remember where you got it.
• You have found an image that would be perfect for a project, but you aren’t sure who the owner is, or what the usage terms might be.
• You are the owner of an image, and want to ensure that it isn’t being mis-appropriated by others.
• You have an image, and want to locate a site with a higher quality or different version of the image.

found via a comment thread in MetaFilter