Paul, David, and I spent part of last week in San Francisco at DPLA West.
We were at DPLA West to chat about the DPLA, our work on the Platform, and the recent DPLA Hackfest.
The event was held at the Internet Archive and at the San Francisco Public Library. Wonderful venues.
One of the highlights of the event was a tour the Internet Archive’s physical archive.
Thanks to DPLA, SFPL, and the Internet Archive for making us feel welcome on the West Coast.
While cleaning out my phones SD card I found these two photos.
Jeff Goldenson’s copy of A Pattern Language:
From just a few days ago, here’s Karen Coyle’s explanation of how FRBR “works.” (It made sense while she was explaining it.)
In this 23min podcast [ogg here], Sebastian Hammer, president of IndexData, explains the srengths and limitations of federated search, which runs queries on a distributed set of sources, as opposed to using a big honking centralized index.
We just concluded class #2 of the Library Test Kitchen, our experimental seminar in the Graduate School of Design. The course is a collaboration between Jeffrey Schnapp (Professor of Romance Languages & Literature, Director of metaLab) Ann Whiteside (Director, Frances Loeb Library), Ben Brady (GSD) and me (Jeff Goldenson). It is the continuation of a seminar this past Fall entitled Bibliotheca, the Library Past/Present/Future. There are many other folks involved in the Test Kitchen — people from the Innovation Lab, the greater Harvard Library and metaLab, who are taking part, and we’re just at the beginning.
As described on www.librarytestkitchen.org, this is a seminar about making. A prototyping lab for libraries. Our goal is to create products, services & experiences, broadly defined, for the Harvard Library community. Generous funding to realize these projects is provided by Prof. Robert Darnton and the Harvard Library Lab. Projects will be deployed in «Test Kitchens» — partner libraries, such as the Loeb and Widener Libraries, that allocate portions of their public space to these experiments.
There’s a hypothesis at the heart of this seminar. Perhaps the students know what the future of the library should be, better than we (library staff) do. So lets put them in the drivers seat and find out.
“Your average citizen is not technologically savvy,” says Marilyn Johnson, the author of This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All
Even as technology takes over more and more of our lives many of us are living in a technology cemetery, filled with old gadgets we have no idea how to revive, computers we don’t know how to program, and ebooks we have no idea how to download to.
Johnson argues that this is a huge opportunity for libraries to revive their place as centers of the community, for librarians to exist not just as oracles of the reference book, but as guides to the technical world.
She spoke with David Weinberger about exactly how this might happen.
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A recent webinar hosted by the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL) featured our ShelfLife and Stackview applications. Also featured in the webinar was a stack browsing application developed by the North Carolina State University Libraries.
I posted an idea the other day. It’s called Library License. It’s a way to make works digitally available through libraries, after a specified amount of time has elapsed since publication date. It is a currently a sketch of an idea, to be evolved openly. It’s more a movement, perhaps in the form of a “drag n drop” clause that content creators may add to their licensing agreements with publishers. The idea is explained in full over here:
This is new and not fully formed, so I’ve added a comment area to the bottom of the LL page where we can talk about things.
The Digital Public Library of America today announced that initial (and interim) development work on the DPLA platform will be done by the LibraryCloud team here at the Library Innovation Lab — Paul Deschner, Matthew Phillips, and David Weinberger — plus our Berkman friends, Daniel Collis-Puro and Sebastian Diaz. We’ll do this as openly as possible, relying upon the community to help at every phase, but this will be our core work during the first phase of the platform’s development, leading up to an April 26 DPLA Steering Committee meeting.
The DPLA platform will enable developers to write applications using the metadata (primarily about content hosted elsewhere) the DPLA will be aggregating.
We’re excited. Thrilled, actually.
Stuff We’re Looking At