It's the time of the year for lists, other lists, more lists, and zeitgeists, so to close off 2007 here at LibraryTechNZ, our own list of things that caught our eyes over the past 12 months:
Thinking, as we are wont to do, about open source: the open source, modular library catalogue VuFind.
Interesting people doing interesting stuff, and sharing it with all the interested people: standouts include the New York Public Library's Labs blog, and the Brooklyn Museum's use of online networking. We also found words of wisdom, blogged by NZ 5-year-olds. Who can argue with the statement " we are special because we got a new cputa [We are special because we got a new Computer]"?
Thinking, as we are wont to do, about open source: the open source, modular library catalogue VuFind.
Interesting people doing interesting stuff, and sharing it with all the interested people: standouts include the New York Public Library's Labs blog, and the Brooklyn Museum's use of online networking. We also found words of wisdom, blogged by NZ 5-year-olds. Who can argue with the statement " we are special because we got a new cputa [We are special because we got a new Computer]"?
Given our future gazing this year (in 2017 libraries will be, new generation National Library, and so on), the Really Modern Library project from if:book, the Institute for the Future of the Book caught some attention.
The goal of the project is to "shed light on the big questions about future accessibility and usability of analog culture in a digital, networked world." If:book came at the question of connections between digital and analogue cultures from a surprising and thought provoking direction, asking "how does the digital network change our relationship with analog objects"? Keep track of the discussion at the if:book blog.
Also from if:book,: the innovative 'next generation' xanadu like blog marginalia tool, CommentPress. The premise behind CommentPress is that often people don't just want to comment (or invite comment) on a whole block of blog post or document, but also at more granular levels: paragraph, word, even letter (e.g. macron or no macron?).
This notion is interesting in relation to the digitisation of historical textual material such as Te Ao Hou (1952-1976) or the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand (1868-1961) . The idea of harnessing new media technologies to keep the past in conversation with the present (without necessarily changing the historical source document) is appealing for our product managers, who, amongst other things, spend a lot of time responding (offline) to comments from readers who have something to say about the version of history the Library has re-presented in digital form on the web.
More future gazing: The jaw-dropping Photosynth presentation is pretty neat. Photosynth, a demo application from the Microsoft Live Labs incubation project Seadragon, gives a glimpse of how we might interact with massive amounts of visual information - check out the tech preview. And we also saw the demo of Microsoft Surface, touted for first release to casinos ... tactile interaction with Library collections is on its way!
The web is alive: 2007 is the year we saw Blogger Play, Flickrvision, and Twittervision. And if you haven't yet met Ms. Dewey, you're in for a treat... is this the future of Library search? Okay, this was actually late 2006... but we didn't see it until this year.
Google Streetview added another dimension to our interaction with maps.
Linux had a good year, hitting an extreme level of Grandma-proof on the technology front. JACK and Ardour stood out for capability, tools like Apt made some of our working lives easier, and shiny trinkets like Compiz gave us pretty things to play with.
And finally - we had to wait until the day of our final post, but it's been confirmed (or at least blogged- same thing, right?) that super sexy librarians will be key to the future of the citizen media world .... so stay tuned, we'll be back with more in 2008.
The goal of the project is to "shed light on the big questions about future accessibility and usability of analog culture in a digital, networked world." If:book came at the question of connections between digital and analogue cultures from a surprising and thought provoking direction, asking "how does the digital network change our relationship with analog objects"? Keep track of the discussion at the if:book blog.
Also from if:book,: the innovative 'next generation' xanadu like blog marginalia tool, CommentPress. The premise behind CommentPress is that often people don't just want to comment (or invite comment) on a whole block of blog post or document, but also at more granular levels: paragraph, word, even letter (e.g. macron or no macron?).
This notion is interesting in relation to the digitisation of historical textual material such as Te Ao Hou (1952-1976) or the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand (1868-1961) . The idea of harnessing new media technologies to keep the past in conversation with the present (without necessarily changing the historical source document) is appealing for our product managers, who, amongst other things, spend a lot of time responding (offline) to comments from readers who have something to say about the version of history the Library has re-presented in digital form on the web.
More future gazing: The jaw-dropping Photosynth presentation is pretty neat. Photosynth, a demo application from the Microsoft Live Labs incubation project Seadragon, gives a glimpse of how we might interact with massive amounts of visual information - check out the tech preview. And we also saw the demo of Microsoft Surface, touted for first release to casinos ... tactile interaction with Library collections is on its way!
The web is alive: 2007 is the year we saw Blogger Play, Flickrvision, and Twittervision. And if you haven't yet met Ms. Dewey, you're in for a treat... is this the future of Library search? Okay, this was actually late 2006... but we didn't see it until this year.
Google Streetview added another dimension to our interaction with maps.
Linux had a good year, hitting an extreme level of Grandma-proof on the technology front. JACK and Ardour stood out for capability, tools like Apt made some of our working lives easier, and shiny trinkets like Compiz gave us pretty things to play with.
And finally - we had to wait until the day of our final post, but it's been confirmed (or at least blogged- same thing, right?) that super sexy librarians will be key to the future of the citizen media world .... so stay tuned, we'll be back with more in 2008.
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