Sutherland Shire Libraries Staff News

NYR December, 2011 Newsletter

Digital December: the Wrap Up

What a thought provoking day we had today at the State Library for Digital December, a seminar featuring Michael Lascarides ( @mlascarides), John Allsopp (@johnallsopp) and Tim Sherratt (@wragge).

All three speakers are web developers/programmers. They either work in Libraries or with cultural data in some way. They were encouraging us to think about new ways to open our collection digitally.

Michael Lascarides works for the New York Public Library. NYPL have recently implemented Bibliocommons for their catalog/website to encourage a more social library experience for their users. They are doing some amazing things with their collection. Check out their crowdsourced transcriptions of their Menu Collection or their Map Warper.

John Allsopp is a web developer. He organises one of the major web conferences in the southern hemisphere, Web Directions South, and was heavily involved in the LibraryHack competition earlier this year.

Tim Sherratt calls himself a cultural data hacker.  He spends a great deal of time playing around with cultural data from museums, archives and libraries. For instance, he wrote himself a way to programatically query Trove for large datasets that he then explores visually (the sort of result set that you can't comprehend simply by scrolling through the records).

Both John and Tim focused on the benefits and opportunities around the releasing of open data for libraries.  Having your data available to developers who want to play with it can result in things that we could never do ourselves.

Here are my Top Five Take Aways from the day.

1. Local content is where libraries have pulling power.
   Your users can't get this stuff anywhere else and it's interesting.
2. The best way to expose your collection is one item at a time.
   A digital narrative can be a powerful discovery interface. Telling a story with passion using one item from your collection is a great way to encourage people to explore more deeply.
3. Obliterate the line between physical & digital.
   Which items in your collection wanted to be something else all along?
4. Make sure you're not getting in the way of the passion of you users.
   The catalogue is a great place to have a conversation about books. Your data is a great source of material for developers. Don't put policies and protocols in place that discourage users from collaborating with you and each other.
5. Data is fuel for the imagination.
   Don't worry about the format. Release your data because you can't possibly imagine what others will do with it!  Folk will work with it however you provide it.

And just as a bonus, here's my thoughts from discussions about how to encourage the use of all this data we're trying to open up.

• Think about what data you have that might be of interest.
• Arrange for volunteers & community programs to help libraries turn content and collections into data.
• Annual library hack day (perhaps a collaborative project across libraries). Ideas are as important as building apps.
• Seed developer interest in your data with a proof of concept or even better, finished projects (maybe you have to pay for this) . Show them you value this stuff!