Pack your sleeping bag, your laptop and your sense of hacking adventure – it’s the Libraryhack Lock-In! A 24 hour festival of geekery at The Edge where you can hack, collaborate, play and learn from data gurus as you work on the ultimate Libraryhack.
The Libraryhack competition is challenging developers, artists, and digital content creators to mash-up and remix buried treasure from Australian library collections. The competition closes on 31 May so this is the ideal opportunity to create an entry with seriously concentrated hacking or mashing.
The Lock-In will be a 24 hour mashup extravaganza. Hack, mix and remix datasets from libraries across Australia. There’s over 40,000 copyright-free pictures, over 100 digitised music scores, a collection of digitised real estate maps, over 100,000 convict transportation records and location information from all QLD public libraries (in XML, XLS, CSV, TXT formats) just from the State Library of Queensland and heaps of other freely available datasets.
Animator / Designer Stuart Nankivell (Port Augusta) created this animation using Stu selected images from the State Library of South Australia’s archive collection on Library Hack. (B69654, B47585_26, B9023). This animation was made as part of Digital Salon‘s and the State Library of South Australia‘s response to Library Hack to inspire creative entries in the competition. Enjoy!
Here are two beautiful photo mashups to inspire entries in Libraryhack. They were created by animator Luku Kukukuku with support from Digital Salon and the State Library of South Australia. It’s exciting to see such creativity using historic photographs from the collections of the participating libraries. Click on the image to see these photo mashups in high resolution.
The State Library of Victoria is hosting two Libraryhack events this coming Friday and Saturday (21 &22 May). Come to the Library on Friday 20 May from10:30am – 2:30pm for a series of presentations that will help you with your Libraryhack competition entries.
Speakers include:
Ben Hosken, Flink Labs – Defining and working with data visualisations
Jonathan Grant, Naturally Being – App development for mobiles
The State Library of South Australia has worked with renowned digital media artist Cindi Drennan to provide examples that will inspire digital artists to enter Libraryhack. Through Cindi’s Digital Salon project a number of artists have been invited to create examples using various techniques and State Library of South Australia data.
Luku Trembath created a video using the SLSA collection image of a butcher shop. Old Time Butcher’s Tayle is an example of Luku’s passion for using old stuff, and old techniques, and mixing them with his animation skills and digital technology. Luku’s experience has seen his productions featured in television, live performance and exhibitions and he has shared his enthusiasm in the wider community, particularly working with youth in collaboration with Carclew Youth Arts and the Helpmann Academy in South Australia. You can also view this animation on Flickr and see more of Luku’s work here: http://www.luku.com.au.
Old Time Butcher’s Tayle
Jessica Foster is also participating in the Digital Salon project and her examples demonstrate her creative approach to using iconic and nostalgic images in the State Library of South Australia collections, to create a whimsical and animated video. With a background in the theatre, visual art and digital media, Jessica has explored the possibilities of hybrid media for the past 2 years, with an interest in incorporating still, projected images, sound and video. From the South Australian regional city of Mt. Gambier, Jessica has largely relied on observing the work of others to inspire her to experiment in this new media and enjoys incorporating colour, composition, rhythm and imagery. Jessica sees herself as an artist”definitely not a techie”. You can also view Embellished Road Trip:Part 1 and Embellished Road Trip:Part 2 on FLickr.
On Sunday May 15 from 12:30 – 5:30 pm at The Edge at State Library of Queensland you can participate in a basic data-mash workshop explaining online programs (eg Yahoo Pipes) that can be used to mash together data-sets for Libraryhack. This workshop will also help you prepare data to create a beautiful data visualisation. Then on the 22nd May you can follow up with an intermediate level workshop to take your skills to the next level.
Find out all the details about these two great workshops and how to book your place at The Edge website.
Here’s a link to the presentation from the 15th may to whet your appetite for the second workshop. It’s on Slideshare.
Here’s a couple of great videos from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). 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.
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
This weekend there are two workshops for aspiring Libraryhack entrants at The Edge, State Library of Queensland.
Libraryhack Animation – HackinMotion
Learn how to give collage a digital twist, with animator Mariana Shek. If you like taking photos, videos, words, sound and music and mixing them together to create a whole new meaning, this animation workshop is a must.
This two-hour workshop will give you basic skills in Photoshop to manipulate old photographs. Then take these images into AfterEffects and learn how to composite and animate in cut-out style. Draw on library resources-photo archives, newspapers, video footage, audio or bring along your own images and data sets. This workshop is booked out but there is a repeat on 17 May. See the details below and book in now.
When: 5.30-7.30pm, Tuesday May 17, 2011
Where: The Edge, Lab 1
Tickets: Free
Bookings: book.it@edgeqld.org.au
Hack to the future!
Your challenge is to take any number of vintage Queensland songs, superbly preserved as scores by the State Library here, and hack them into the 21st century. To kickstart the creation, The Edge resident sound Catalyst Andrei Maberley has taken the digitised scores and turned 20 of them into MIDI files. In this workshop we’ll throw these files into anything that fits in on the Lab 1 computers including Ableton Live, Logic and Garageband. All these scores are out of copyright, so if you think you can take “The Bundaberg Vocal One Step” and turn it into a gritty urban masterpiece, then sign up.
When: Sun 8 May, 1 – 3 pm
Where: The Edge Lab 1, State Library of Queensland
Tickets: Free
Bookings: Bookings required book.it@edgeqld.org.au
Developers, designers, information visualisation experts and other creatives will be given free reign to re-mix and repurpose amazing cultural content as part of Libraryhack. Participants will have access to thousands of collection items and datasets released from the National and state libraries of Australia and New Zealand. Collections experts and curators from the State Library of NSW will be on hand to provide amazing insight to its digitised collections, including its unrivalled First Fleet collection; pre 1885 photographs of Sydney; 3,500 photographs of goldfield towns in NSW and Victoria (Holtermann collection); early survey maps of Sydney; and much more. All participants on the day will be encouraged to enter their prototype applications and concepts into Libraryhack.
Book now to get your place for this day of mashing and hacking.
When: Sat 7 May, 8.30am – 6.30pm Where: Mitchell Building, State Library of NSW Tickets: Free Bookings:Bookings
On Sunday 10 April the State Library of Western Australia hosted its first Day of “Hack”. The day brought together a range of people, including tech experts, coders and those just interested in learning more about this thing called “mashup”.
There were a range of great speakers, including Myles Eftos (President of the Australian Web Industry Association) on Yahoo Pipes, Darren Mottolini (from Landgate) on SLIP, and Steven Miles & Nick Cowie (from State Library WA) on different things they’ve been doing with Library data, including creating research tools for the Police Gazettes with Open NPL, Cuneiform and Ocropus, and overlaying “then” and “now” photographs with Google maps.
The final session was an ideas and a “what do you want” discussion, which explored what participants want from libraries in terms of data, and brainstorming ideas for what can be done with open data.
It was a fantastic day and generated a range of ideas, which we hope will be developed for the Libraryhack competition.
See more from ABC Open who were there filming some of the day and talking with Sarah McQuade, the Battye Historian, about Libraryhack.
The State Library of Victoria is hosting two Libraryhack events this coming Friday and Saturday (21 &22 May). Come to the Library on Friday 20 May from10:30am – 2:30pm for a series of presentations that will help you with your Libraryhack competition entries.
