stephen Abrams appears to be “in the house” so to speak. As well as them there, This Week in Libraries dudes from abroad. Apparently this is some kind of hot topic. I’m hoping to get some good information out of it as our two (replacement) touchtables are shipping out on Friday.
Stepen Abrams Moderates
Ohshit, they’re running the whole thing. Jaap and Erik are doing it. Awesome. They’re looking for practicality. I’m happy to hear that.. they’re a public library, but we can always adapt it. Let’s roll!
Shanachies
What is that? It’s a library road trip across America. Or perhaps it’s a–having technical difficulties, apparently. It’s a storytelling thing, apparently.. or something. The slides moved pretty fast. We’re listening to sound from their laptop put through their mic. Hella. Fucking. High Tech.
They were in New York… and they asked people what they thought about libraries. To create stories. (They really do have far too much money…) In Delft they’re all about the storytelling, community-style. They wanted to see if there was a different way to share stories beyond books and connect people to them. They went all over the world. I–really can’t believe the money. I’m jealous. I admit it. Everyone is, don’t deny it.
They got their video podcast called thisweekinlibraries.com. I’ve watched a few episodes and it’s neat to get an international perspective. They have a lot of different speakers from all places related to libraries, especially people with entrepreneurial interests. They have a freaking Microsoft Surface… which you can’t even buy anymore, last I knew. When we get our new touchtables, I’ll bump that company. They’re a startup from New York who makes them to order at half the price.
Holy crap they have an amazing library in the Netherlands. Open invite, you guys. Let’s all jump on a plane. There’s all kinds of neat stuff… I can’t really describe it all. Check out the slides to see, even though you won’t get the captions. They have a thing that lets you download content to your smartphone with a bunch of different content. It’s also a touch-interface so you can play with it while you’re in front of it, too. There’s apparently one in the airport and the airport has it’s own library.
They have a fucking wall of screens.. as in 32 LCD screens, as in the ones that are thousands of dollars. For crying out loud they have an insane amount of money. Why donesn’t the American government care about libraries as much as the ones in the Netherlands? I mean, maybe nobody loves anything THAT much, but still… a bit more support would certainly be nice considering how we’re learning to do so much more with so much less. It looks… so very shiny. They have neat events they do with it.. but I was busy ranting. Sorry.
DOKLAB is a new company they started to help develop solutions for libraries. And one of them is multitouch solutions. They created a thing called the Heritage Browser that they think has been pretty successful. They act as consultants and talk to all kinds of people. Even an architect who’s building a library in the desert of Saudi Arabia. I–I really don’t know what to think of these guys.. they have it so well. Is it really so different in Europe?
Okay, finally…
MULTITOUCH
They think of multitouch as a way to bring outside traffic into the library. eBooks are selling libraries short, and we need to expand into eContent as much as possible and find ways to push the content out. They’re working with local heritage institutions and found that they are willing to give content to the library as a way to reuse their content.
Multitouch: think big iPhone. Only hopefully not iOS, because it’s too restrictive. The big difference with the tables is the ability to handle and interpret the touches of multiple individuals at the same time. I’m super excited to work on the tables when they come in. They really can’t come fast enough. And another good thing is that the tables bring people into the building. The physical space is still important, especially in community building. (They can also be walls, but it’s crazy-expensive.. there was a company in germany that did it)
The Surface 2.0 isn’t freaking out yet. It’s been delayed. Unsurprisingly. The new one is supposed to be cheaper. But we haven’t seen hide nor hair of the damn thing. Like I said, I’ll plug the company in New York that is filling the gap that Samsung is missing out.
The tables have object recognition which can be used for all kinds of fun stuff. But yeah… still not out yet. Stephen is holding it up with his questions.. way to go, Stephen. 
They can be used for informative purposes, social purposes, and it’s really attractive and shiny. Everyone likes shiny things, as the tablet bar (or whatever it was that UNR did was called) showed. Unfortunately, the mTouch has it’s own operating system.. we’re thinking of putting Android on the touchtable.. though that may not work as well for the multiple users. So, we’ll see.
The Heritage Browser
The Cultural Heritage Of Delft Project. Screw those guys, our archive is gonna be AWESOME and blow their nordic asses away… but I’m not competitive. Nope. I’m calm. But having shiny things and getting the content out there is a good idea. They connected patron zipcodes to pictures of their street and it links to old pictures going back 100 years. They got a movie (so many movies) showing it in action. It even allegedly uses check-out information of patrons to show them more interesting content.. and it recognizes it through QR codes (a bit low-tech for them, I’d think). It even pulls up the metadata (essential). They can also use the physical google map to find the street they like and the photos are geotagged and can be pulled up by selecting a street from a map. This is what can be done with an enormous budget..
They have tons of user research, work with the Technical University, and do lots of prototyping.. Gosh, I wish I could work with them. Find out what the users want. We need to have a user-centric outlook. Project P is looking into an easy way for people to add photos to the archive… or I would hope the archive, though it’s probably being added to the library… knowing how people think. It scans the photograph FROM BEHIND. That’s right, from the back of the photograph. It’s NUTS. And they want to use handwriting recognition to add the metadata (even if it’s only basic stuff like broad location, year and subject). Handwriting recognition is notoriously shaky though.. they have a slider to give a date, even approximate ones. They get to iterate. They’re considering a recipie database with stories attached to it, perhaps.. it’s really cool and I’m crazy-jealous.
They also have a multitouch flickr viewer which makes life easier for other people implementing it, basically using the same kind of metadata collection. One of the best things about touchtables, since they are so cost-prohibitive, they don’t date as quickly as smartphones. Maybe pulling photos from phone could be done as well. But pulling from iOS and Android could be different… having a programming team and money to iterate would be nice.
That’s DOKLAB. I’m Jealous, reporting from Monterey.
