Creator: Corin Edwards | Source: John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland Neg: 18880
Welcome to the Libraryhack website. Libraryhack was a mashup and apps competition using data from Australian and New Zealand libraries.
Entries in the Libraryhack competition have now closed. The winners were announced on June 24 at The Edge at the State Library of Queensland. Congratulations to all the winners and thanks to everyone who participated in the competition.
All of the datasets made available for the competition will still be available on data.gov.au so keep creating amazing mashups and sharing them with us.
You can also talk with us here at the website, contact us by email or follow us on Twitter (@libraryhack2011) or Facebook.
The winners of the Libraryhack competition were announced last night at The Edge at the State Library of Queensland. It was a great night beginning with a stimulating and thought provoking forum discussion and ending with an exhibition of some of the entries at The Edge.
Here are the winners:
Data mashup/applications
Major prize winner – Micahel Henderson, for his entry Talking Maps
Queensland Prize winner – Sam Cavenagh, for his entry Conviz
The winners of the Libraryhack competition will be announced Friday 24 June at The Edge at the State Library of Queensland. The announcement will be webcast live at 5 pm (AEST).
Before the announcement there will be a stimulating and thought provoking panel discussion. Anna Raunik, Project Manager of Libraryhack, Gavin Sade of kuuki, Dr Ian McColl, Senior Research Fellow in the faculty of Science and Technology at QUT and Brian Fitzgerald, Professor of Intellectual Property and Innovation at QUT will talk together about the challenges of open data, building engaged communities and libraries as creative digital hubs.
Some of the most innovative Libraryhack entries from around Australia, including interactive 3D projections, photo mash-ups, iPhone app demonstrations, web games and music remixes will be on display at The Edge. This exhibition will be open until 1 August.
This digital media mashup entry celebrates libraries and their online collections. The mashing of content from around the world inspires us to think about the information world we all have at our fingertips today.
Here’s the description of the entry from the creator “This movie encourages people to ‘travel’ online using library resources. The images and music relate to early forms of travel. The movie is a kind of slideshow, and it uses images from the collections of the State Library of Queensland, the National Archives of the Netherlands, and the Boston Public Library.
The music, ‘Come Josephine in my Flying Machine’, is a digitised cylinder recording from an online collection. The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project is based at the Donald C. Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara. Cylinder recordings were the very first commercially available sound recordings. If the music sounds a little scratchy at first, it might be because this year is its hundredth birthday. uses data from Queensland and the Netherlands from their Flickr Commons photostreams.”
Here’s an entry in the photo mashup and data mashup categories. Soul Solutions in Queensland created a mosaic of images from one of the datasets released by the State Library of Queensland, which allows you, when using the high resolution version, to zoom in and view all of the images in detail. The creator of this entry said in his description that “The State of Queensland’s most significant asset is its people. Here I’ve created Queensland made entirely of images of its people from the State Libraries digital collection.”
You can view the full resolution version here: http://www.soulsolutions.com.au/mosaic/QLDLibrary/
Here’s how the mashup was created:
10 Gigapixel (10,000,000,000 pixels) mosaic of the State of Queensland made from 52,102 images from the State Library of Queensland’s out of copyright photographs from their photograph collection “People and places from across Queensland across time”. Data source is here: http://data.gov.au/dataset/picture-queensland/
The image for the mosaic is NASA’s Blue Marble Imagery cropped to the political boundary of Queensland. The mosaic was created using AndreaMosaic’s 64bit professional version, Photoshop CS5 and DeepZoom tools. It was processed on a Dell dual 6 core Xeon X5680 T5500 Workstation with 24GB Ram. It took just under 7 days to compile the images, mosaic, process, tile and upload to the website. The energy used to power the hardware was offset by a 6KW/h Solar System and the Queensland Sun.
Here’s an application entry that began its creation at the Mashup at the Mitchell event at the State Library of New Zealand. Newserve is described here by the creator of the application.
Newserve provides an easy-to-use search interface, interlacing the results on the map and a timeline glider. The ultimate goal of Newserve is to provide a single point of access to all newspaper resources in libraries of Australia – whether it be just catalogue information of the newspapers stored in the libraries of Australia or be the digitized newspaper collections.
Data sets used
At present Newserve is powered by following datasets:
The catalogue data was available in MARC21 format. We have parsed it’s different fields and extracted the required information, indexed the data and laid it out as a layer on the map with timeline. Trove data is accessed using the experimental trove API, which is developed by Tim Sherratt. in the future, We plan to add the newspaper catalogue data of all the state libraries of Australia as those are become available
Newserve features
Visualisation features:
Visulaisation on map – mapping all the newspapers of State Library of NSW collection and also Trove digital collection
Timeline visualisation – Along with map all the newspapers are shown on a timeline glider
Interactive timeline traversal – Just press the play button to see the the evolution of newspapers in Australia
Search features:
Search the newspaper collection catalouge of State Library of NSW by title, date and location
Search Trove digital collection by keyword, title, date and location
Filter the map markers to see either catalouge data or Trove data or both
This entry in the digital media mashup category from Tim Koch in South Australia uses software that can interpret image data into a sonic form. Tim constructed a short soundscape that encapsulates the mood and tone of places that have been recorded in photographic form from the past.
We’re going to be showcasing some of the many Libraryhack entries on our home page in the run up to the announcement of the winners on 24 June. All the entries can be viewed on the website we encourage you to tweet or talk about the ones you most like on Twitter or Facebook.
This photo mashup entry – Seaside mishmashed – comes from Tasmania, and is beautifully evocative of the seaside.
The State Library of Victoria held a Libraryhack event on 20 May and there were some inspiring speakers and presentations on mashups and apps. Here are two presentations from the day.
Flinklabs is a data visualisation company who has delivered products such as data visualisations of public transport systems in Melbourne and Sydney. Ben Hosken, Flinklabs founder, delivered an engaging presentation which gave an insight into the methodology and philosophy of data visualisation. Workers in this field need to understand the maths, computer science, as well as the human emotions involved in data interpretation. Some of Flinklabs best work has been easy to deliver visualisations which make an immediate impact on its audience.
Naturally Being is development firm who entered the myMarkets iphone app into the Victorian “App My State” competition. They created a free app as a result of that competition, and are now able to share their point of view after continuing to support and maintain their app for the iphone community. This presentation gave the audience a good perspective of what’s required to create, launch and maintain a successful app – a lot of hard work!
QUT has joined in Libraryhack to create and release a range of YouTube clips to help Libraryhack participants to use the libraries’ thousands of cultural items from their collections that have been digitised for online use to create their mash-up entries.
Since the first post about these videos there have been several more created that are really thought provoking and interesting. One of the latest is Kate Davis interviewing Kathryn Greenhill from Curtin University about the importance of opening up the data that sits behind library collections.
QUT’s YouTube clips were created jointly by masters student Richard Gray and Associate Lecturer in Information Systems Kate Davis with support from QUT Library. Watch them all on QUTube
