Courtney Johnston from the National Library has sent me this little gem – a turn-of-the-century tweet, if you like, mined from the Papers Past collection. It’s from the ‘personal items’ column in the paper – the Grey River Argus, 16 May 1906: ‘The many friends of Mr Arthur Yarrall (jnr) will regret to learn that he is confined to his room suffering from a severe throat.’
I’m the first to let my mind wander when someone talks metadata to me, but Digital New Zealand has converted me to its power. I posted recently on this initiative from the National Library. Well, DigitalNZ was officially launched this week by a talent National Library team and their content partners and collaborators, who should be rightly chuffed with their achievements.
To top the release of the Coming Home search widget and the remixing tool Memory Maker, DigitalNZ has released an open API that lets developers build services over the metadata that DigitalNZ has harvested from its content partners in the culture and heritage sector. To understand how this works, click on the fabulous diagram above, which explains it visually much better than I ever could in words.
An example of the kind of tool that’s possible (one that the DigitalNZ team ‘prepared earlier’) is the customisable search builder, which lets users design their own mini search engine to search for New Zealand content on a subject of their interest – volcanoes, disasters, ANZAC day, and so on.
Wow! You can see the educational uses immediately. Pop a search on your wiki or website relating to your class’s inquiry or project – learners will be guaranteed quality New Zealand content on that topic.
To continue a theme in recent posts on culture and heritage, you may have noticed a smart new widget in the right-hand column of this blog.
To mark Armistice Day on 11 November, the Digital New Zealand project, led by the National Library, has released two new internet tools that connect New Zealanders with digital content about our country at the end of the First World War.
The widget on Lunch Box – the ‘Coming Home’ search widget – lets users search digital content held by a range of museums, galleries and archives (the widget aggregates metadata – the items themselves are still hosted by the individual content partners). It’s being tested by DigitalNZ’s content partners, and Lunch Box is stoked to be one of the test sites (see the list of other test websites).
Even better – you can embed this search widget in your school’s website, wiki, intranet or blog by grabbing the code from the DigitalNZ website. (If you can’t add the search widget to your site, then you can link directly to a hosted version of the search.) What I love about this is that DigitalNZ has recognised that providing services on their website is one thing, but letting users add the tools to their own spaces and places on the web is even better.
