The University of Michigan Library just released our very own home-grown tagging tools. Now users can tag library web pages, catalog records, image collections, and some of the Scholarly Publishing Office’s electronic journals. More access systems will add tagging eventually. Any tag or user can be subscribed to using RSS. Since launch earlier this week, 291 things have been tagged. It will be interesting to see how this project will evolve. Seems like this has a lot of potential for solving the problem of too many silos.
Just released yesterday, The Internet Archive’s Open Library project now has an extensive wiki-ish book site. Their goal is for users (anyone) to populate it with every book. Some books already have some full-text and some link to the scanned images via their old pageturner. I think this will be interesting to follow since most of the content is user-generated and I’m wondering how well this will take off. Lots of people already use LibraryThing, but thats more about making your own collection - so there’s (maybe) more incentive to tag and comment. The Open Library is about making one big collection.
Link To Open Library Beta
OCLC Worldcat just added list-making functionality. You have to create an account to use it - here’s the FAQ. This is great to see - especially since I’m currently working on something similar.
I’m curious how many people would use something like this if their OPAC offered it (I know some OPACs do have a “my shelf” type thing - but I don’t think they typically allow you to share your list with others).
I think this could be great for profs to make reading lists, or more social Amazon-like lists so you can create a recommended reading list on a topic.
In light of the recent CIC announcement of a shared repository, I thought it’d be a good time to look at some of the current systems that provide access to digitized books.
Museum of Fine Arts Boston - Hopper Sketchbook
There are a few pageturners that actually animate the action of turning a page. I think they are lovely but definitely only good for special items or exhibits. Link to example item (click “Hopper’s Sketchbook”)
Princeton University Library Digital Collections
This is definitely one of the most attractive pageturners. I like the thumbnail view, image zooming (though I think the image area could be a bit bigger), and lovely collection browse page.
The Future of the Book - The Iraq Study Group Report
This one’s not quite a “pageturner” because the text was likely born digital so they have the luxury of starting with great text and complete metadata. I think it’s worth mentioning because I like the annotation functionality.
I pulled this one out because it has more functionality than the average pageturner. It allows you to save favorites, compare 2 pages, order saved to present in a “slideshow” etc.
And I couldn’t possibly leave out MBooks (disclaimer=I work on this project). The Michigan Digitization Project is currently based on the books digitized through the Google partnership but will eventually include items scanned by UM. About the project | Link to example item
My full collection of PageTurner interfaces
Here is a feed from my delicious for all the pageturners (or pageturner-like systems) that I know about.
Kristin Antelman, from NCSU spoke about the next generation catalog. Again, we have to help patrons find what they didn’t realize they needed. Many of the OPAC’s she talked about are also in this del.icio.us list.
Jessamyn West, from librarian.net spoke more generally 2.0 technology. Slides and a great list of links from her presentation are on her website. Library2.0 isn’t about what you have, its about how you use it. And having the tools, experimenting with technology will only be successful if everyone is on board and willing to fail. Accommodating the needs of the patrons and saving them time also means that we will need to spend more time. But we have to make it easy - and there are many ways to do that… besides making things generally easy to use, we have to go where the users are. ALL college kids are on facebook. And if all of our patrons are on facebook, we should be too.
Power to the Patrons!
Using usability, accessibility, functionality, & aesthetics towards a more usable library.
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