Speaker
Mr
Mats Hernvall
(DBC, Denmark)
Description
What is the focus of TING.concept?
The ever increasing consumption of digital media in our wireless and always connected world should be good news for the libraries. The interest in and availability of books, film, music and games has never been bigger. Social interaction on internet is booming. The technical possibilities to share content and experiences find new and ever more amazing solutions for each day.
But the libraries are stuck with: old systems on proprietary platforms, new requirements implemented slowly, data and function lock in, information silos, an increasing need to integrate incompatible systems for each new data format and supplier and finally a plethora of strange user interfaces far from common internet standards.
TING.concept is a project initiated by the two largest public libraries in Denmark – Århus Public Libraries and Copenhagen Public libraries in a consortium with DBC, a Danish supplier of national and local library infrastructure, products and services. The projects vision has been to share the results and collaborate with everybody that are interested and was formulated as: “To release all information in the libraries, make the user and staff knowledge visible, create relations between them that facilitates interaction and place it in a context where it gives meaning to the users”. In short, are we trying to answer questions like:
• How do we ensure that libraries are relevant in the digital society?
• How do we take part in the conversations where the users are?
• How do we mediate huge amounts of content and knowledge in the right context?
• How do we harness and share the collective innovation power of the library community?
• How do we create win-win-win situations between non-profit organizations, commercial partners and the library users?
• How do we create cost effective solutions that scales – big and small?
• And so on.
What is TING.concept?
TING.concept is fundamentally three things:
1. Our conceptual solution to the project vision and how to ensure that libraries are relevant in the digital society. In order to offer library services in the multifaceted digital society we need to standardize on data, data structures and data access. (For more info look at - http://gnit.dk/dokumentation/diagram-over-ting-konceptet2) The brønd.TING. (Data dwell) is capable of harvest, store and index large amounts of data in different formats. It builds and preserves relations between objects to keep API’s and web services as lightweight as possible. Middle.TING delivers API’ s and web services for interaction with the content trough search, faceted results, auto-completion, spelling, “others that have borrowed”, and so on. The transaction.TING layer handles integration with back-end Library Systems and other back-end digital content systems. User interaction on different platforms- the web, mobile phones, information screens, touch screens, photo-frames and so on is handled by presentation.TING projects. New content types and media types will be added to brønd.TING through analysis of new sources and harvesting schemas through content.TING.
2. An infrastructure platform that implements the TING.concept. The platform is based on Open Source technology with an SOA architecture approach. The back end uses de-facto standards as Apache Lucene, Solr, Fedora Commons and PostgresSQL. Front end technologies used today are Drupal for web interfaces. (More to come).
3. TING.concept Community is an open eco-system for cultural innovation, collaboration, and shared results in the digital society. The Open Source community handles everything from publication of the TING.concept software and support to it's users to strategic decisions for future development and partnerships. The TING.concept Community consists of several quite self governed projects (brønd.TING, mobile.TING, drupal.TING, content.TING, partner.TING) and a governing Community Council. The TING.concept Community will officially be launched at the end of Q1 2010.
The current state of the TING.concept is public beta for Copenhagen and Århus. There are several other libraries and projects committed to the TING.concept. Read more on the project site www.gnit.dk (gnit are ting spelled backwards).
Author
Mr
Mats Hernvall
(DBC, Denmark)
