emtacl10: a website for the academic conference

I have updated the emtacl10: emerging technologies in academic libraries website; the changes add a lot of content (and some new dates!) to the information that was published previously.

For me, the interesting thing was combining a set of technologies:

• blueprint css
• jquery
• eXtensible Metadata Platform (XMP)
• RSS
• AJAX

The really cool thing about these technologies is that they made everything really quite easy; easy to create valid, accessible code, and easy to do all of this quickly.

The “assets” list is created from metadata embedded into the files that are listed there; this, and the rest of the content is updated using AJAX provided by the jquery framework. Blueprint css is used for the layout.

Two day’s work inclusive of everything! (And I really dislike creating webpages, but this verged on fun.)

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Conference: emtacl10 — emerging technologies in academic libraries

I happen to know that the first announcement of this conference is just around the corner, so I thought that I’d give it a bit of press now: emtacl10: emerging technologies in academic libraries. [Update: dates 26-28 April 2010!]

In layman’s terms, this is a web 2.0 conference with a difference: it’s aimed fairly and squarely at the higher educational library sector. Sounds exciting? I hope so!

Head on over to www.emtacl.com for more information.

The BBC officially goes “2.0”

The BBC has taken its new site out of beta.

BBC’s customizable Web 2.0 beta

The BBC has launched a beta of its homepage.

My colleague Joost (who’s an industrious fellow that keeps his eye open for this kind of thing) sent me this link, and he’s right, this is quite noteworthy.

The page is widget-based and features the ability to turn on/off content, move content around the page, customize content (form pre-formatted options) and more.

The impressive thing is that entering, for example, a postcode for weather also changes how the other widgets work, so I get my local radio stations and local news based on the choices I make in other widgets.

Nice. But, do we want a library that works like this? Imagine being able to select content and have this reflected in what new titles are shown, journal ToC RSS feeds are offered, etc. It just might work…