Sunday, November 27, 2005

Bridging to user environments

Thinking and searching more about "Getting into the User Environment" again i can across a weblog-item of Lorcan Dempsey called "Bridging to user environments" Read this: " "At the Access 2005 conference Ross Singer impressed the audience with a compelling presentation of how one could stitch library services into user environments leveraging the 'sloppy underbelly' of the web. He showed firefox extensions, bookmarklets, scraping and scripting approaches, acknowledging that while they create real value they are in their nature often not as robust as one would like. This presentation clearly struck a chord in the crowd. A major strand of library activity needs to be to make hooks into library services available in such a way that we can more readily develop services and tools to build compelling user applications of the type that Ross suggested. This thought is behind my question at Access [ppt]: what would a library service which can only be delivered through common services (Flickr, delicious, Technorati, ....) and browser tools (toolbars, bookmarklets, ..) be like. We seem to have turned a corner: we recognize that it is vital to put the library in the user environment. It is nice when the user comes to the library environment, but we cannot assume that they always will: we need to be where they are."

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