Steve Museum: A Social Tagging Experiment

I'm in this ridiculously great course at Catholic University, Art & Museum Librarianship whereby for a week straight we visit fascinating art museums and other cultural institutions all around Washington D.C.:

The National Gallery of Art
The Smithsonian Libraries
The National Archives of American Art
The American Folklife Center
The National Museum of Women in the Arts
University of Maryland Art & Architecture Library
University of Maryland Performing Arts Library
National Museum of the American Indian
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation Library and Monticello

Anyway somewhere along the way I picked up this neat website, Steve Museum an experiment in social tagging. Anyone can participate in this ongoing research project that will help develop new ways to catalog and describe works of art through social tagging. Just sign up and flip through images of art and start describing!

"See art you haven't seen before. Look in a new way. Describe works of art in your own words. Exchange your ideas with the community of art lovers. Lead others to artworks they wouldn't normally see. Create a personal relationship to works. Let museums know what you see. The more you tag, the richer the experience for all."

Drupal & Joomla: A cure for lousy library website design!

Fed up with frequent encounters with unnecessarily lousy websites, my friends Kristin and Marina and I started experimenting with ideas for providing good free web design help to smaller underfunded libraries. At the time we thought, hey, why not just provide free pre-designed library templates for download! The problems with this of course is that one would need to know some html and, because it doesn't solve the bigger issue of archiving content and integrating the catalog into the front end, it'd only be putting lipstick on a pig. But we were on the right track....

Drupal and Joomla, free open source content management systems, THAT'S what we were looking for! Unlike building a simple set of webpages from Dreamweaver or FrontPage, a content management system has a database structure behind it and allows you to create, store and organize all of your information. This data is then queried, uploaded into an html document and displayed as a webpage according to your template style. It allows you to set your design style and makes it extremely easy for others to go in and edit the content without needing to know any programming or html. Content management systems can run into the tens of thousands of dollars but Drupal and Joomla are free....

Drupal Examples:
There is a great overview, Building Public Library Websites with Drupal on the Library and Technology Association Blog. The Ann Arbor District Library is a perfect example of a Drupal based library website.

Joomla Examples:
For examples of Joomla based library websites check out the uber informational Joomla in Libraries site. Or, if you have a little more time, there's the Open Source Solutions for Public Libraries presentation by the Tyngsborough Public Library which includes a section on their use of Joomla.

Amazon.com and the Library Catalog....so happy together

This is great. I first discovered that universities in the UK are using a script so that anyone on the university system, searching Amazon.com on their Firefox browser, will see a link indicating the status of the book they are searching for at the university library. They will be told whether or not its available, if it's available in electronic format, on loan, etc., and users can link right into the catalog from Amazon to reserve it.

Turns out its on this side of the pond too and a number of public libraries have put this into action. In fact our very own Loudon County Public Library System offers this download for its patrons, as well as the DC Public Library and the Mongtomery County System. (my own university library however hasn't done this...sigh)

How does it work? Well, luckily I have a super genius brother and he puts it this way:

"Greasemonkey is a plug-in for Firefox that lets you overlay additional content over an existing web page, usually using JavaScript. It's like scribbling on a page of newspaper."

This article with screen shots elaborates further on it: "A simple Talis script detects ISBNs on a page at Amazon and uses this to query a shared database of library holdings. Greasemonkey is then used to write information on libraries holding the book back onto the Amazon page (note the '@libraries' box, not normally evident in Amazon results)".

userscripts.org has a large collection of these library lookup scripts and in theory, creating a customized script for your own library can be as easy as modifying one such as Carrick Mundell's for the Seattle Public Library to reflect your own catalog details.