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5/11/2006

Those Danish libraries do some cool things ...

A colleague (who just also happens to be the newly appointed St. Paul Public Library Director - they're soooo lucky!!) just returned from speaking at an exciting conference hosted in Denmark - The Children's Interactive Library - and shared with me some of the ultracool prototypes projects that the library there has developed.

One that drew my attention was a project called the BibPhone which uses unused areas of RFID chips to store short user comments about books. The idea is that a user could browse through a library collection with a BibPhone in hand and scan any book to retrieve short recommendations from other library users/staff. A short video (quicktime) of the project can be seen here. But as soon as I heard of it, it reminded me of the post I did two days ago on Shotcodes. Now imagine users combing your isles and using their cameraphone to grab a shotcode image and download (or upload) user comments about the title. To me that's Library 3.0 !!

I'll can say is that I firmly beleive all libraries need to get on board with L2.0 now. Because when 3G mobile communciation standards finally hit the US, we're going to see a whole new wave of 3.0 technologies.

View the Quicktime movie (sorry, no English subtitles -- but honestly you don't need it cause there's no audio track - At least I haven't been able to hear one)

Also of interest an interactive table called the StoryFinder

PS: This when I wish I knew Danish or at least could find a decent online translator.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Helene
I am one of the makers of the bibPhone. Let me correct you a little - we do not use the storage on the RFID Tag - we only use the ID to query the database if any sounds are linked to the specific book. The project could be done just the same using a bar-code scanner. I give you a link for more photos and a little english text - here. I am working on a little video on the two prototypes - hopefully it will be finished tomorrow.

Best regards - andreas