digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

I'm at Museums and the Web 2005 in Vancouver (actually, that's where I live). As a librarian I generally find non-library conferences refreshing because they remind me that libraries are not the centre of the universe, and that some "library" issues extend across silos. This is a brief end-of-day report from the conference (they have wireless but only in the foyer, not in the session rooms!). All of the conference papers are/will be online.

I attended two sessions of potential interest to digitizationblog readers, "Finding Stuff" (which naturally made me think of Roy Tennant's "only librarians like to search, everyone else likes to find") and "Interface Design". The highlight of the first session for me was a presentation on SCULPTEUR, which utilizes innovative browsing interfaces built on the CIDOC conceptual reference model, "a common and extensible semantic framework that any cultural heritage information can be mapped to." The presenter demoed a slick interface that combined traditional keyword searching with graphical and drill-down interfaces to allow users to search by facets such as material type (e.g., glass), production method (e.g., etching) and so on. He also demonstrated a neat "content-based" search that allowed him to choose an image containing a particular shade of blue and then retrieve other images that contained that shade.

The second session had three presenters, all excellent, but I most enjoyed the talk by Otmar Moritsch. What he demoed was amazing: kiosks in the Technisches Museum in Viena allow visitors to explore the history of how various media have converged, and through the use of a smart card allow users to create/rearrange/personalize content on site and then download the results at home. There is even a webboard/email feature that allows you to log in and see if there is anyone in the museum and logged onto a kiosk station, and if so send them a message. One audience member asked if he could have guest access (from North America); Otmar's response: the Museum's philosophy was that the smart cards facilitates a "post-exhibition" experience -- users visit the museum, engage in representing their experience there by personalizing content in the kiosks, and then retrieve that content for use later. Even though it's hard to imaging a user of a digital collection produced by a library doing the same thing (since libraries focus on the remote use of their digitized collections), I think that libraries can learn from museums' efforts to help users create the post-"use" experience by adding tools to their digitized collections that allow this type of activity. For example, libraries could implement similar tools for use of print material in rare books and manuscript collections along the same lines as what the Technisches Museum is doing.