Wednesday 7 December 2011

Digital December: The Wrap Up

Photo Credit: Ellen Forsyth (@ellenforsyth)

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).

Here are my Top Five Take Aways from today.
  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!
If you went along I'd love to hear what you got out of the day in the comments...