Web 2.0 & Libraries, Part 2: A Review

Those of you who have been searching for practical and relevant ways to integrate social networking technologies with digital library and repository systems might find the following very useful. The lead author is Michael Stephens of Dominican University; the content is based on his Tame The Web blog as well as his writing, teaching, and roadshows/seminars he has presented with his colleague Jenny Levine over the past two years. Few of the individual bits and pieces pieces were new to me -- see below for some that were! -- but the whole thing presented together was a bit like drinking from a fire hose...

Web 2.0 & Libraries, Part 2: Trends and Technologies
Library Technology Reports, September/October 2007, vol.43/no.5 (ISSN 0024-2586) (pdf of the ToC)

I think this work provides an excellent summary of the current generation of social network technologies, with a particular focus on how librarians are applying these tools to create a set of practices some are labeling Librarian 2.0. Particular focus on how their patrons are using the technologies, and how they need to provide for the patron. This is not a library SOA discussion!!!!

This is a great collection because I find it somewhat frightening (and very exciting) how far along these pieces have come, especially how easily and seamlessly they can and are being mashed together. Also, there were some services that I didn't even know about, esp. Ning, which enables users to assemble their own social networking services, or Netvibes, which lets you mix together anything.

For me, these really set the bar high for how to "make DSpace personal," which clearly means how to make DSpace fit in...

Capturing China's knowledge: The China Digital Museum Project

The HP news site has just published an interesting story about the China Digital Museum Project and the growing use of DSpace for other applications in China. It also includes a good background history on DSpace and a bit on the future of DSpace at HP and HPLabs. Here's a snip from Capturing China's knowledge: Ancient Terracotta warriors, scientific discoveries, even 2008 Olympics to go online:

As the world’s most populous nation, the People’s Republic of China rarely does anything on a small scale -- and its efforts to share its cultural and academic treasures with the rest of the world are no exception.

Using DSpace, a digital archiving system that HP Labs researchers helped create and continue to support, institutions throughout China are putting literally tens of millions of objects online for the first time. Those objects -- or more accurately, digital copies of them -- range from up-to-minute scientific research reports to historic film clips and photos of traditional Chinese sporting events to centuries-old calligraphy and paintings.

One Chinese DSpace initiative involving 18 major universities is well on its way to archiving up to 90 million objects.

A second, scheduled to coincide with the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, will hold two terabytes of information -- which, depending on how the information is compressed, is roughly as much content as you’d find in 1,000 feature-length movies, 300,000 photographs or 500,000 song-length music files.

For a more technical review of the China Digital Museum Project, see Rob Tansley's article, Building a Distributed, Standards-based Repository Federation: The China Digital Museum Project in the July/August 2006 issue of D-Lib Magazine.