i school conference : google book project

I'm quite excited ! I'm going to be at the i conference 2006 at the University of Michigan. I'm looking forward to two exciting days of (surprise surprise) information flow :)!

i conference is organized by the ischools project - the naming of which I'm sure has nothing to do with an ipod as suggested elsewhere! . I'm sure the people who thought of it had better things to do than name an important movement after an ipod !

The iconference started with presentation by John Wilkin and C. Perry Willett of the University of Michigan Library on the Google Book Search Project. A brief overview of their talk is at the SI 504 class blog.

Apart from the host of interesting points disucssed on the class blog here are a couple that I think will be fascinating to look at:

1. from the interface design point of view - browsing scanned books in the current manner (clicking next on a link to go to the next page is primitive and in my opinion a poor translation of the hyperlink metaphor. Can reading online be made more interesting ?

2. hyperlinks within the books ?

3. a social tagging perspective to the hyperlinks in books ? How controlled should the tagging be ?
who should see content tagged by whom ? and a host of such issues that are inherent in any
tagging system.

(remind me of our concept of virtual annotation at the CAIF conference.)

The next talk is by John Seely Brown at 7:00 pm today which I will be attending ! You might want to view the plenery session live , or if you don't do that just stay tuned for updates here ;)

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