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.
