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@paulhagon
I’m Paul Hagon.

I’m a web developer at the National Library of Australia. It’s a very majestic building...

Me
And we all take our jobs very seriously.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulhagon/2230499064
I trained as an industrial designer and I have a fascination with how we interact with things, whether they are physical objects or
virtual objects on a web page.

G
Galleries
L
Libraries
A
Archives
M
Museums
The things I’m going to cover, don’t just relate to libraries. GLAM, really on the web their job is all the same, deliver collection
items to end users.

An understanding

Part of my job I spend time participating in social networks which is fun, but is also vital for learning. Today I’m not going to talk
about how we are using these as marketing tools, but how we are using some of these as tools to enhance what we do.
The common thing with most of these web 2.0 applications is they have API’s to allow people to import and export data from
these services

API
Hooks into a website to
obtain data
RSS XML
ATOM HTML
JSON OAI
What is an API? Hooks into a website to obtain data. Might be RSS, XML JSON
So what does all this jargon mean.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/
rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/
elements/1.1/" xmlns:cc="http://web.resource.org/cc/">
<channel>
<title>Delicious/usefulresources</title>
<link>http://delicious.com/usefulresources</link>
<description>bookmarks posted by usefulresources</description>
<atom:link rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/
usefulresources"/>
<item>
<title>Roman Numerals</title>
<pubDate>Fri, 03 Apr 2009 07:55:26 +0000</pubDate>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://delicious.com/url/
810479813ce0c59d4785bcbfbc7f1889#usefulresources</guid>
<link>http://www.novaroma.org/via_romana/numbers.html</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[usefulresources]]></dc:creator>
<comments>http://delicious.com/url/810479813ce0c59d4785bcbfbc7f1889</comments>
<wfw:commentRss>http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/url/
810479813ce0c59d4785bcbfbc7f1889</wfw:commentRss>
<source url="http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/usefulresources">usefulresources's
bookmarks</source>
<description>Nifty conververtor - just plug in the letters and out come the numbers!</
description>
<category domain="http://delicious.com/usefulresources/">reference</category>
<category domain="http://delicious.com/usefulresources/">history</category>
An XML file
<category domain="http://delicious.com/usefulresources/">numerals</category>
<category domain="http://delicious.com/usefulresources/">numbers</category>
<category domain="http://delicious.com/usefulresources/">roman</category>

[{"u":"http://www.novaroma.org/via_romana/numbers.html","d":"Roman Numerals","t":
["reference","history","numerals","numbers","roman"],"dt":"2009-04-03T07:55:26Z","n":"Nifty
conververtor - just plug in the letters and out come the numbers!","a":"usefulresources"},
{"u":"http://www.amta.org.au/AMTA/default.asp?ID=365","d":"AMTA","t":
["statistics","technology","mobile"],"dt":"2009-04-02T03:30:29Z","n":"","a":"usefulresources"},
{"u":"http://www.llv.net.au/zportal/zengine?VDXaction=Navigation","d":"ZPORTAL
Search","t":
["victoria","catalogues","libraries"],"dt":"2009-03-29T22:55:52Z","n":"","a":"usefulresources"},
{"u":"http://pdfse.com/","d":"PDF and Ebook search engine","t":
["reference","ebooks","books","searchengine"],"dt":"2009-03-04T03:06:39Z","n":"Content
bigger than Australia & New Zealand but quite a bit in there of interest - full text, free and
online!","a":"usefulresources"},{"u":"http://www.worldhistory.timemaps.com/","d":"TimeMaps
Atlas of World History","t":
["reference","world","atlas","maps","timelines"],"dt":"2009-01-20T03:53:44Z","n":"Free online
atlas of the world which you can browse by time or place to see what's gone on since ancient
times.","a":"usefulresources"},{"u":"http://images.google.com/hosted/life","d":"LIFE photo
archive hosted by Google","t":
["reference","images","resources","photography","pictures"],"dt":"2009-01-20T00:13:23Z","n":""
,"a":"usefulresources"},{"u":"http://ibrain.org/","d":"Have access to all the information of the
internet at your fingertips with iBrain","t":
["Internet_directories"],"dt":"2009-01-20T00:04:37Z","n":"","a":"usefulresources"},{"u":"http://
www.atua.org.au/browse.htm","d":"Australian Trade Union Archives","t":
["politics","australian_history","archives"],"dt":"2009-01-15T03:21:19Z","n":"","a":"usefulresourc
es"},{"u":"http://data.aad.gov.au/aadc/seaice/","d":"Sea Ice Measurements Database","t":
["globalwarming","antarctic"],"dt":"2009-01-15T03:20:11Z","n":"","a":"usefulresources"},
{"u":"http://data.aad.gov.au/aadc/gaz/","d":"Antarctic Names","t":
["geography","Gazetteers","antarctic"],"dt":"2009-01-15T03:18:59Z","n":"Gazetteer of Antarctic
place file. These from the Australianat, but for a computer they provide beautifully structured data.
A JSON names are both horrible to look Antarctic Data Centre","a":"usefulresources"},{"u":"http://
visual.merriam-webster.com/index.php","d":"Visual Dictionary Online","t":
["dictionaries","reference"],"dt":"2009-01-04T23:32:40Z","n":"Merriam-Webster's visual

The most common or easily digestible form of an API is an RSS feed - you would have clicked on an orange icon sometime.

You might subscribe to an RSS feed to keep up to date with the latest news

Or to download the latest episode of a TV show.

Interaction

http://www.flickr.com/photos/grytr/296878046/
What’s important, the medium or the data? Let’s take an example of a music CD.

I want to listen my CD’s on my stereo, in the car, on my laptop, on my iPod. The failure of DRM, it didn’t let me share or reuse
the data in the way I wanted. But for each of these instances I need to make a copy of the data, it’s not really re-using it.

So let’s look at another example. I take a digital photo & download it to my computer

I could print it out, but this is the electronic world so....

I’ll upload the photo to Flickr.

Flickr has API’s that let me reuse the data without making extra copies of the images. So I can look at my images in a different
interface such as Flickriver.

Or I can look at my geotagged images in Google Earth

Or I can view my photos on a different device like an iPhone in one of the many applications that are available. In all of these
instances the data is being reused, not copied.

The basics
Let me give a practical example for the library world.

Title
URL
Description
Category
All of our websites have a list of other websites that we like. These usually have common pieces of information - a title, URL,
description and a category.

AskNow - an online chat service hosted by librarians around Australia and New Zealand.

They set up a Delicious account, where admins from around Australia add in useful reference sites. They add tags to these
resources from a controlled vocabulary. Users can browse through delicious and find sites, although this isn’t necessarily the
best user experience as they jump from one site to another.

delicious has a series of API’s that let me extract the data and display it within the branding of the AskNow site. I can create a
tag cloud

And then use the API again to display a list of resources of a particular tag or category.

JSON
API
When we have is distributed publishing using delicious as our content management system. By keeping everything within the
one framework it’s a much friendlier user experience & it’s a lot more accessible.

We can also use this same process for our Asian collections area and publish in foreign character sets.

Take a lead from the blogging world and have a “share this” link. Serious researchers use tools like zotero, but a lot of users are
familiar with services like delicious for organising their research. If your application has an email this link it also needs a add to
delicious and a share on facebook link.

Now our records can appear within the larger scheme of delicious.

If you are storing all your data in these services, make sure you back it up up regularly.

The sum of all institutions

As individual institutions we all have valuable photographic collections...

The Powerhouse Museum

The Australian War Memorial

But if we reuse and combine the data from each of them...

We get a much more valuable service. Instead of searching many places to find information we only have to visit one place.

Community
≠
Consumer
Your community isn’t just about consumers

Community
=
Producer
It’s also about producers. With API’s (and licences) that allow the reuse of data, your community can produce their own
interpretations of your data and enrich it.

Taking it to the world

Signed in as Paul Hagon (3 new) Help Sign Out
Home You Organize Contacts Groups Explore Search National Library of Australia'sSearch
photostream
Slideshow Share This
National Library of Australia's photostream
Sets Tags Archives Favorites Profile Add National... as a contact
Affectionately known by his staff
as "The Dux". Sir Douglas Mawson
leader of the Australasian Antarctic
Expedition of 1911-1914 and leader
of The British Australian New Valrene Tweedie as Odalisque in
Zealand Antarctic Research 'Scheherazade', Chicago, Ballet
Expedition 1929-30 Russe de Monte Carlo, 1947-48
Don McMurdo
performing
arts...
10 photos
Wolfgang
nla.pic-an10932811-47 Hurley, Frank, 1885- nla.pic-an13711129-5 Seymour, Maurice, Sievers
1962. 1929 - 1931 1929-1931. 1 of 1 album... 1904- Australia 1947-1948. 1 negative : b&w ; collection
9.7 x... 9 photos
All rights reserved
Uploaded on Feb 14, 2008 All rights reserved
0 comments Uploaded on Nov 27, 2007
1 comment
Children's [group photograph at Ludmilla Lvova, Oleg Tupine and
the] festivity of Saint Lucia, an unidentified dancer in costume
Swedish Church, Toorak, [Victoria], for Symphonie fantastique, Ballets
1962 Russes
Maurice
Seymour
collection
4 photos
Many institutions started to explore Flickr & post their collection items there. The problem was copyright issues. Images were
either incorrectly appropriated with the copyright of the institution, not the photographer or they had to be given a Creative
Commons license.

Signed in as Paul Hagon (3 new) Help Sign Out
Home You Organize Contacts Groups Explore Search The Commons Search
Photo by George
The Commons
Your opportunity to contribute to describing the world's public photo collections.
Welcome!
The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show Participating Institutions so far...
you hidden treasures in the world's public photography
archives, and secondly to show how your input and
knowledge can help make these collections even richer.
You're invited to help describe the photographs you
discover in The Commons on Flickr, either by adding
tags or leaving comments.*
FAQ | Rights Statement
A Commons Sampler Try a search | View by tag
To overcome this Flickr created The Commons, where institutions could post “no known copyright images”. Australia has a
strong showing with Powerhouse Museum, SLNSW, Australian War Memorial, SLQLD participating.

The Powerhouse Museum was the first Australia institution to join and started posting images on Sydney from their Tyrrell
Collection.

When the Powerhouse has catalogued their images they’ve added in location metadata - a latitude and longitude.

By geo-tagging the images it allows us to plot them onto a modern day map & put them into some form of perspective. We can
plot them on other map services such as Google maps, or Open Street maps.

In the middle of 2008, Google introduced their street view service to Australia. This is where they drove around the streets with
a camera on the roof of the car taking photos. This ties in with google maps, so what you can do is pick a point on the map and
obtain a panoramic image of that location.

+
+
maps
+
street view
=
By using a combination of API’s from Flickr, Google Maps and Google street view we can combine lots of data and convert it into
something really interesting.

A flickr meets streetview then and now. Value adding to the images without any extra work on the part of the institution

Just before Christmas New York Public Library joined Flickr commons. A set of photos they released were a series of around 160
photos of New York from the 1930’s.

Unlike the images on Flickr from the Powerhouse Museum, New Your Public Library haven’t added any geotagged metadata with
the image. But what the images generally have is very good street addresses. That’s enough for me to use another API to get
some valuable information

Pike and Henry Streets,
Manhattan
geocoder API
latitude= 40.713183
longitude= -73.992395
By passing a human readable address through a geocoder API, we obtain a latitude and longitude. This allows me to plot the
location on a map. This is exactly the same process you use when you type an address into Google Maps.

+
+
geocoder
+
maps
+
street view
=
By using a combination of API’s from Flickr, Google Maps geocoding API, more Google Maps and Google street view...

I can recreate the then and now, without any geotagged images. All of this information can be passed back into the community.
Relying on Google to keep expanding Streetview. Excited at the upcoming expansion in Europe, currently it’s too hit & miss to
really be useful.

Services not sites
I would like to put forward the notion of us thinking about what we do as services rather than websites.

So this is twitter.

3rd party twitter clients for desktop or iPhone - offer different interfaces and offer different features. I’m a web designer so the
interface and interaction method is important to me.

56% Text
use the web interface
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_twitter_clients_definitive_list.php
In a study carried out by readwrite web in April 2008 over nearly 40,000 tweets - 56% used the web interface. Given the
explosion of mobile devices in the past 12 months, I suspect this figure is probably less. If the twitter website disappeared,
many users wouldn’t even notice. The underlying service API’s are the backbone of Twitter, not the website.

DigitalNZ, a collection of digital resources in New Zealand from Government, community groups, private sector provide an API
which developers can use to expose their data in different ways. I can search and sort on various parameters and get the
response back as XML, RSS or JSON.

They have their own search interface

But other institutions are using the DigitalNZ API to add value to their own collection searches.

DigitalNZ Image Distribution
century number
0100-0199 1
1000-1099 3
1400-1499 14
1500-1599 18
1600-1699 6
1700-1799 42
1800-1899 6765
1900-1999 44819
2000-2099 16010
View by century, decade, content_partner or language, or visit DigitalNZ.
Copyright 2009 The National Library of New Zealand.
Licensed under the GNU GPL. Get the source.
Other people are building unique interfaces to the data, searching for images by date in a timeline fashion.

I’ve built a location search interface.

That queries DigitalNZ, Google maps and Flickr

Login Register View Posse
Home FAQ Access Directions Contact E -News search (alt+s)
Visit Exhibitions Calendar Collections Education Research About Give Join Shop Press Community
Collections: Browse Collections
Collection Home Arts of Africa and the Pacific Islands American Art Arts of the Americas Arts of the Islamic World Asian Art Contemporary Art collapse
Decorative Arts Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Middle Eastern Art European Art Libraries and Archives Photography Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art
Exhibitions Tags Tag! You're It! On-View Favorites Recent Images API
10,846 records currently
online.
Search
Full text Tags only
more
NEW! Want to play tag?
Collection Tags
man child pewter
horsesculpture
statue jesus
Native American chair
buildings women people
drink tree river
sky Christianity
seating AAM water
ceramic light oil
Brooklyn Museum have opened up their collection with an API. They have had the community build on canvas
The Museum's collections were initially developed, in the early decades of the twentieth century,
iPhone applications, studies
by such outstanding curators as Stewart Culin, Herbert Spinden, and William Henry Goodyear,
based around materials used in artwork.
with the generous support of collectors and donors from Brooklyn and around the country. glass religious art
Continuing to build upon their pioneering work, the Brooklyn Museum has amassed one of the
largest and most diverse collections in the United States. Its vast holdings range from the ancient American

People have built their own interfaces into the collection.

ABC Jazz website. The site doesn’t exist without the services. Each page is built from resources reused from about 50 API’s on
the web including Wikipedia, YouTube, MusicBrainz, LastFM, Discogs.

Taking it to the streets

The latest versions of Firefox and Safari on the iPhone are now location aware. This means the browser knows where you are
located.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulhagon/3054813157/
So here I am on George Street, Sydney, approaching Martin Place

http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulhagon/3055648996/
I can take out my laptop and join a wi-fi network. The browser returns my location as a latitude and longitude. I can use a
combination of the Flickr API and the Google maps API to display all the historic images from Flickr commons within 500m of my
location on a map. I can pick an image of Martin Place...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulhagon/3054813483/
and I can compare it with the current environment that I am standing in. Of course this demo uses images, but it could be any
material that we have in our collections that could be related back to a location. With the recent explosion of mobile
technologies (thanks to devices like the iPhone), the library of the future may take advantage of ideas like this.

Let me show you an example of how we can take pieces from all over the web and build a location aware application. Picture
Australia contains an open search interface. This is traditionally used to add a Picture Australia search to the browser search
box, but it also allows me to query the data and return an XML file. As there is very little geo data in Picture Australia I can pass
in the name of a town.

latitude = -19.258106
longitude = 146.818351
reverse geocoder API
Townsville
I can obtain the name of a location by using using a reverse geocoder to convert a latitude and longitude to a locations name.

maps
+
reverse geocoder
+
shapefiles
+
OpenSearch
=
By using a combination of API’s from Flickr, Google Maps geocoding API, more Google Maps and Picture Australia...

I can build an application where you drag the map around, zoom in, and it searches the Picture Australia for the location name. If
I use the latest version of Firefox it is location aware, so I can click on the ‘Go to my location’ button...

and it takes me to my current location (Townsville) and does a search for Townsville.

I can use a similar process for the iPhone, taking the collection out to the streets where I can interact with it in the environment I
am in.

Global Positioning System
+
reverse geocoder
+
OpenSearch
=
By using a combination of Global positioning systems, API’s from Flickr, Google Maps geocoding API, more Google Maps and
Google street view...

I can make an iPhone application

That can query my current location

and return all the results from Picture Australia

And I can read about the historic images from our collections that are relevant to my current location.

There is currently a mashup Australia contest

Tcext
Members of the public are able to create new applications by reusing and combining data from library materials, gallery
materials and government data from institutions like the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

“I think we needed to recognize that ideas about
our data can come from anywhere, and encourage
outside partnerships. We should recognize that
programmers from outside the organization will
have skills and ideas that we don’t have internally
and encourage everyone to use them with our
data if they want to. When they do, we want to
make sure we get them the credit they deserve by
pointing our visitors to their sites so they get some
exposure for their efforts.”
Shelley Bernstein, Brooklyn Museum
http://electronicmuseum.org.uk/2009/04/16/the-brooklyn-museum-api-qa-with-shelley-bernstein-and-paul-beaudoin/
Brooklyn museum has the right idea in opening up their data

1
What I want to leave you with is the thought that 1 person can make a difference. When I was building my then & now, the
National Library of New Zealand joined the commons, shortly after streetview launched. Seeing what could be done using my
application, they reconsidered putting up more street photographs. For someone working at 3am in their dining room to be able
to affect the patterns of a national institution in another country really says something for the power of the people.

Thanks!
http://delicious.com/paulhagon/qpla09
phagon@nla.gov.au
@paulhagon
All the links for the sites I have shown are on delicious. Thank you.