Library of the Future: Alphaville 2016
For our current assignment, we had to create the web portal for the Library of the Future (at least that was the option I chose). The page was to be a visual response to the "Impacts of Mass Digitization Projects on Libraries and Information Policy." An article by Trudi Bellardo Hahn with this title summarizes the issues we were to address.
My fictitious Alphaville Public Library is in effect a gallery of Library 2.0 features which link to real sites, most of them actual libraries which have begin to transform their sites to offer more and more "virtual" library services using web 2.0 technologies. [What the heck is this "2.0" business?]
The first two features on my page ("Search the Virtual Library" and "Virtual Reference" - on the upper left side of the navigation bar) highlight the futuristic possibilities which mass digitization of the libraries of the world could bring us. Google Book Search holds the place of the Virtual Library of the future, while an MIT Artificial Intelligence project holds the place of the virtual reference librarian. The latter is, as I understand it, the actual technological basis of what used to be AskJeeves.com (now Ask.com), which answers questions in natural language like "How high is Mount Everest?" Researcgh continues in this are and it is just a matter of time until voice recognition software combined with this sort of natural language processing are able to replace employees at information desks, both real and virtual, the world over...
Meanwhile, the "Googlized" library of the future , the NextGen Library, the "Library 2.0," is already upon us. OPACs (online catalogs) which look and act like (and perhaps even improve upon?!) interfaces like Google and Amazon.com are already being developed.
One of the most impressive of these to me is the Lamson Library experiment with an OPAC interfaced embedded in blog software (WordPress, specifically) -- what Casey Bisson (its architect) has dubbed (for lack of a better name) the WPopac.
Casey Bisson's blog post explanation about this is well worth reading for anyone interested in becoming a systems librarian, and fascinating for the rest of us (I guess I'm not in that latter category--yet?...we'll see...). It does not replace the ILS (Integrated Library System), but provides an interface with it.
Wow. There's just so much to blog about on this topic, I can't help but agree with my classmate on the frustrations of being a grad student in this program. Perhaps all grad students everywhere can empathize too. More on this in the next post... and yet more...!
My fictitious Alphaville Public Library is in effect a gallery of Library 2.0 features which link to real sites, most of them actual libraries which have begin to transform their sites to offer more and more "virtual" library services using web 2.0 technologies. [What the heck is this "2.0" business?]
The first two features on my page ("Search the Virtual Library" and "Virtual Reference" - on the upper left side of the navigation bar) highlight the futuristic possibilities which mass digitization of the libraries of the world could bring us. Google Book Search holds the place of the Virtual Library of the future, while an MIT Artificial Intelligence project holds the place of the virtual reference librarian. The latter is, as I understand it, the actual technological basis of what used to be AskJeeves.com (now Ask.com), which answers questions in natural language like "How high is Mount Everest?" Researcgh continues in this are and it is just a matter of time until voice recognition software combined with this sort of natural language processing are able to replace employees at information desks, both real and virtual, the world over...
Meanwhile, the "Googlized" library of the future , the NextGen Library, the "Library 2.0," is already upon us. OPACs (online catalogs) which look and act like (and perhaps even improve upon?!) interfaces like Google and Amazon.com are already being developed.
One of the most impressive of these to me is the Lamson Library experiment with an OPAC interfaced embedded in blog software (WordPress, specifically) -- what Casey Bisson (its architect) has dubbed (for lack of a better name) the WPopac.
Casey Bisson's blog post explanation about this is well worth reading for anyone interested in becoming a systems librarian, and fascinating for the rest of us (I guess I'm not in that latter category--yet?...we'll see...). It does not replace the ILS (Integrated Library System), but provides an interface with it.
Wow. There's just so much to blog about on this topic, I can't help but agree with my classmate on the frustrations of being a grad student in this program. Perhaps all grad students everywhere can empathize too. More on this in the next post... and yet more...!
posted by Edwin Oliver at
1:50 PM
1 Comments:
Really interesting links, Ben. Thanks for all the info!
Tina
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home