Report back from: “Pancakes and Mash”, – a library technology ‘un-conference’ at the University of Lincoln on 8 March 2011.

 Mashed Library is about ‘bringing together interested people and doing interesting stuff with libraries and technology’ (definition taken from: http://www.mashedlibrary.com/ ) The keynote speaker was: Gary Green, who is one of the founders of the Voices for the Library (VFTL) campaign against public library closures. As part of the speech he discussed some of the online tools the campaign uses to get its message across.

Two of the more interesting ones were: Paper.li: Paper.li allows you to produce a Twitter “newspaper” as an easy to read way of sharing information with people who follow you. It does this by bringing together content from articles, tweets, Flickr and youtube videos on subjects of interest to you or your followers and organizes them into newspaper-style format. This is then published automatically to Twitter on a daily or weekly basis – you choose. VFTL uses paper.li to publish a daily newspaper that brings together tweets with a link containing certain keywords or names related to public library closures. For a short three minute video introduction to paper.li:

 Google Fusion Tables: Google Fusion Tables is a Web service provided by Google for data management and web publishing. It allows you to visualise the data stored in tables and spreadsheets by means of charts, (such as pie charts), timelines or geographical maps. You can also add filters for selective visualizations. Once you have established your chart, you can embed it in a web page or blog or send a link by email. For more info, go to: http://www.google.com/fusiontables/public/tour/index.html  For an example of a GFT see the closures map on the VFTL website http://www.voicesforthelibrary.org.uk/wordpress/?page_id=765  This is produced using a GFT from a Google docs spreadsheet of data on library closures. If you click on any of the libraries on the map it will pull up more information about that library from the spreadsheet data, (this is an example of the selective visualization filter.)

Post by: Elaine Lewis