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The second session I attended at Mash Oop North was by Brendan Dawes who "does things with data" as he described it, creating playful and interactive visualisations. The major message, for me, in his talk, was how much more creative we could be with the way we represent data in libraries. The OPAC tends to be quite serious and workmanlike, and, sure, usability is important. But what about encouraging playful and creative exploration of information? Maybe libraries need to learn a lesson from Donald Norman's Emotional Design where he realised that his focus on usability in his earlier works could divert attention from the kind of design which we fall in love with. There's a more obvious place for playfulness in public than academic libraries, but a more ludic approach might be a good way to engage students and encourage them to explore library services in the early stages of their university careers.

The final formal session of the day was perhaps the most practically useful for me, a whistlestop tour through applications by Mike Ellis. He particularly focused on applications which could be used to 'scrape' data from webpages which aren't formally set up for data sharing through RSS feeds or APIs. I must admit to getting a little lost in this session, joined by a few others in the Twitter chat, but Mike came to the rescue by putting all the information down in a blog post on scraping, scripting and hacking which I'll definitely be revisiting.

The nice thing about being at a techie conference was that lots of people were using Twitter, and so I got to experience bits and pieces of the other talks by following along on the #mashlib09 hashtag on my borrowed-for-the-day iPod Touch. More on Twitter to follow in my other thoughts on the conference.

Note: photo features obligatory white-blood-cell-in-transit-to-conference shot. The white blood cell team did quite well at fending off conference lurgy.

Labels: conferences, library tech, mashlib09, professional development, Web 2.0