Talis Library Mashup competition winners

Lots of good entries for this year's competition - the winners (from the Talis press release)

The First prize of £1,000 was awarded to John Blyberg of Ann Arbor District Library in Ann Arbor, MI. His entry, Go-Go-Google-Gadget, shows how simply library information can be integrated into the personalised home page offered by Google, and is described by competition sponsor and member of the judging panel, Talis’ Paul Miller, as “an excellent example of taking information previously locked inside the library catalogue and making it available to patrons in other contexts where they may spend more time than they do in their catalogue.” Available information includes new and the most popular material in the library, and patron-specific information on checked-out and requested items. ‘Superpatron’ Ed Vielmetti applauded the simplicity of this entry, remarking in a clear invitation for others to follow John’s lead that “the visible source code is very tiny and easily hackable.” Vanderbilt University’s Marshall Breeding concluded, “I like this entry’s spirit of opening up information in the library system and putting it under the control of the user."

In recognition of the current exchange rate, the sum of $2,000 has been paid to John.

The Second prize of £500 was awarded to the Alliance Library System in East Peoria, IL, and their global partners in the Second Life Library. Their entry, the Alliance Second Life Library 2.0, was described by Talis’ Miller as “both a testament to international co-operation amongst libraries and a compelling demonstration of the ways in which traditional library functions can be extended into cyberspace, reaching new audiences in ways exciting and relevant to them as they live their lives.”

In recognition of the current exchange rate, the sum of $1,000 has been paid to the Alliance Library System, and they intend to use the funds to extend their work within Second Life.

I'll be writing more about more of the entrants now - there's a lot of good stuff that got submitted - see the Library Mashups category for more.

UPDATE: links added to entries for each of the winners (blogs in both cases). Still todo: spotlight more of the runners-up.

Technorati Tags: library, mashup, talis

Comments

[Dean C. Rowan]

A quibble: to view these winners, I had to link from this post to the press release, where the same laconic so-called descriptions appeared. From there, I headed to Talis' detailed descriptions--rather to a list of detailed descriptions, from which I had to select a link to each individual entry. The link to the winning entry was a blog posting consisting of a URL linking to Mr. Blyberg's more elaborate discussion, which nevertheless requires further deviations to get the gist of his utility (e.g., a PDF'd discussion of his PatREST spec).

Now, Ed has of course provided a caveat at the close of his posting, thus explaining one of these degrees of separation, but does nobody--not even Talis!--have the slightest interest in clearly summarizing the nature of these entries? Why should anybody hope to urge these participants to continue innovating in the name of library and information access?

[Paul Miller]

Dean

that's a valid point. We - and, as Ed says, others - will be working to extract and share information on the individual applications, and on the broader trends and issues that they highlight.