Wednesday, January 28. 2009

Location Tech Tops Librarians List

Location technology was among the trends cited at the Library and Information Technology Association Top Tech Trends panel at the American Libraries Association Midwinter Meeting. Josh Hadro, writing in the Library Journal covered it this way:

While the panel frequently has addressed mobile technologies in years past, this session extended to geo-tagging and the use of location-aware data services, setting the groundwork for a call for libraries to use geospatial data more programmatically in the catalog and in wider applications. This could help users identify and locate institutions that offer access to useful resources (as can be done via WorldCat), and perhaps even find geocoded items on shelves within the buildings themselves.

[Crawford] Lynch [director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)] cited the Flickr Commons project as an example of "crossing a new threshold in the management of collective description." He added that, while the Library of Congress's and others' participation in the photo-sharing pilot was interesting in itself, it also represented a move toward using a variety of means and platforms to generate "narratives about content." By capitalizing on individual interest and expertise, collection managers might "start building bridges between knowledge that's held out in the broad public and the knowledgebases that libraries have."

Posted by Adena Schutzberg at 06:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |