Innovative Ideas Forum, Canberra, 10 April 2008

The National Library of Australia is holding another of their excellent free Innovative Ideas Forums, 10 April 2008 :

Innovative Ideas Forum
Program

Morning - chair Monica Berko

9.00am Welcome

9.10am Professor Gerard Goggin (Professor of Digital Communication, University of New South Wales)

Topic: The Internet and the Mobile Phone: Histories, Possibilities, Challenges

10.00am Kris Carpenter Negulescu ( Internet Archive )
Topic: Digital Services and Online Research: The Future of Who does What and For Whom
Today institutions around the globe struggle with the daunting task of archiving and maintaining for future generations a record of the Web –the social, economic, cultural and scientific heritage of nations, states/provinces, academic disciplines, and other communities of interests—and with the large-scale digitization of traditional materials. How can/should current policies, partnerships and best practices, allocation of funds and/or research investments shape the future of digital services, i.e. what is provided, who is a provider, and for which audiences? This talk attempts to explore the current trends and considerations that could hold the most influence over this future.

10.50-11.20 Morning tea

11.20am Richard Walis (TALIS)
Topic: Beyond Web 2.0 -The Continuing Journey
Is Web 2.0/Library 2.0 just about rounded corners on your web site, links to Amazon, sharing tags with your fellow patrons, and the Library Director’s blog? These developments have led to a welcome opening up of libraries, their systems, and the minds of the librarians that run them.
Have we reached a destination on a road of innovation or are these just symptoms of the journey? The benefits of what we are seeing are in general localised to individual libraries or services. It is only with the open sharing of the data produced by Web 2.0 features such as tagging, and building on the semantic relationships between library data, social networking add-ons, and other rich data sources across institutions, that the real benefits of Web 2.0 be realised - by then we will be utilizing Semantic Web technologies and probably be calling it Web 3.0.

LUNCH 12.10pm - 1.25pm

Afternoon - chair Margy Burn

1.25pm - 1.35pm Introduction to rapid prototyping for innovation projects at the NLA - Warwick Cathro

1.35pm - 2.20pm Steve McPhillips and Mark Triggs (National Library) - VuFind.
Alison Dellit (National Library) - NLA's single business prototype.
Library systems operate in a significantly different environment than they did a decade ago. New technologies, new ways of thinking about information discovery and greater competition in the information space mean users have rapidly changing expectations of search services. This creates an uncertain environment for system development. In this presentation, we will discuss some of the National Library's experiences with using prototyping and rapid development techniques to build resource discovery systems that are more responsive to users' needs. We will look at the National Library's new catalogue prototype, which uses VuFind; and the "single business prototype”.
Douglas Elford (National Library) - What is the MediaPedia?

2.20pm - 3.00pm Stewart Wallace (Dictionary of Sydney)
Topic: Modelling and deploying urban history - Terms, Entities, Factoids, Graphs.
The Dictionary of Sydney is building a digital repository of text and multimedia related to Sydney's history. The repository is designed to facilitate a variety of deployments including web, mobile, RSS etc. In seeking the best method for connecting all these resources to Sydney's urban history, the Dictionary is developing an accompanying semantic model of Terms, Entities and 'Factoids' to create an extensible web of digital connections

3.00-3.30pm Afternoon tea

3.30pm - 4.00pm Julien Masanès (Director of the European Archive Foundation )
Topic: Next Generation web archiving methods
Julien will talk about the Living Web Archives (LiWA) project, a three-year project funded by the European Union. This project will carry Web archiving beyond the current approach, characterized by static snapshots, to one that fully accounts for the dynamics and interrelations of Web content. The result of LiWA's work will be a set of next generation Web archiving methods and tools making possible the creation and long-term usability of high-quality Web archives. Aspects of the project's research will focus on providing for the capture of the hidden Web, the filtering out of unwanted content through spam and trap detection, and addressing the temporal incoherence inherent in current Web capture methods and tools. The research will also address the rapid semantic and technological evolution of the Web in order to promote the long-term viability of Web archives.

4.00 - 430pm Gordon Mohr ( Chief Technologist for the Internet Archive's Web Archive )
Topic:Challenges on the horizon
The pace of innovation on the web demands constant attention from those who seek to record the discourse of the early 21st century. Gordon will speculate about these trends and how the Internet Archive is adapting its own techniques and constantly innovating to create tools to keep pace with these changes.