What will you get out of a Mashed Library event?
Mashed Library is a semi-unconference style event centred around the theme of data mash-ups in a library context (“bringing together interested people and doing interesting stuff with libraries and technology“).
The first event took place at Birkbeck College in November 2008. Since then, there have been events at Huddersfield (Mash Oop North!), Birmingham (Middlemash) and Liverpool (Liver and Mash). Click on the links to find out more about what happened at each event.
Rather than try and predict what you might get out of attending a Mashed Library event, I’d like to invite anyone who’s attended a previous event to leave a comment 🙂
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I’ve been to 2 previous Mashed Libraries events. What I picked up from them is that they give you a chance to explore how you can use data and information creatively; how you can re-use data in ways that it was never intended for; how you can combine data from different resources and create something new. For example, my library service recently put together a fiction book map using resources from Google maps, library catalogue records and Librarything. I wouldn’t have known how to do this if it wasn’t for Mashed Libraries.
They were both very relaxed events and everybody who was there seemed to be there because they really wanted to be there, not because they were told they had to go.
The events tend to include (1) short presentations about tools that can be used in data mashups, such as Yahoo pipes, scraperwiki and how libraries have used these tools (putting together automated reading lists, library related maps) (2) Practical sessions to create practical working mashups/info resources.
It’s not programming heavy, but deals more with the practical tools and what you can build with them. I really enjoyed the events – it’s inspired me to create so many different mashups and got me away from thinking that the way to present information is just as a plain bit of text on a screen. It also showed me how to turn my ideas into reality.
Gary Green
June 15, 2010 at 4:10 pm