Library 2.0 Seminar Day Two

This was day two of the Library 2.0 seminar being held here at Ohio State.

I started the day discussing mashups and providing a primer on Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services. The later two turned out to be pretty difficult concepts to present. I knew I was in for a challenge when I overheard discussion at the coffee table that they never even heard of mashups before. Even though I distilled the concept to non-technical concepts I still saw glazed over eyes.

Perhaps I should have stuck to the mashup concept and should not have tried to explain the underlying architecture/concepts used to create them. Yet, there was some value exposing the attendees to the concepts and terminology although many may not have gotten them right away.

I will post my slides after I remove some copyright protect elements. All the webcasts are being archived at OSUs institutional repository and I will post a link to them once they become available. (NOTE: If you attended the seminar please see the endnote in this posting)

Second on the agenda was Ellyssa Kroski (InfoTangle) presenting Folksonomies and Social Tagging. She provided a well organized discussion of tagging and introduced the concepts of enterprise and library oriented social tagging as well as the advantages and disadvantages of folksonomies.

After lunch, Stephen Abram (Stephen's Lighhouse) offered up "Our User Experience: Puzzle Pieces Falling in Place." Stephen's discussion focused on the idea that libraries should be spending their energies on creating a library experience that the customers want, not one that librarian's think their customers want. If you have never see Stephen present, he has a very interesting vision of where libraries should be heading (for many it may be too real to deal with). I found this Powerpoint on his blog which was very similar to the one he used.

Last but certainly not least, the seminar was closed with Lorcan Dempsey' (Lorcan Dempsey's weblog) "From Discovery to Disclosure: How Will Libraries Connect Resources to Users in the Web?" Lorcan had several messages including a continuation of his In the flow theme. If libraries want their resources to be discovered they have to be disclosed to a discovery environments that people actually use. For example, to project the discovery experience into other contexts is to syndicate services or data to a discovery environment which is outside the library's control to bring people back into the library's networked environment.

ENDNOTE:

- To remember the basic concept of SOA just think of the Ford/GM assembly line analogy I provided.

- Think of Web Services as a way for a web site to syndicate ( or publish, expose) their content for other web sites to use or aggregate.

- An API is that it is a small application that actually exposes the content as a Web Service.

- The mashup music example was PartyBen's Boulevard of Broken Songs. Sphere: Related Content