Wednesday, April 09, 2008

CIL2008: Kete

Eric Atkinson, from Orange County Library System (FL), talked about their implementation of Kete. Kete allows a community to cooperatively build a a digital library that contains:
  • Images
  • Audio recordings
  • Video recordings
  • Documents
  • URLs of web resources
It can also contain:
  • Topics (articles on a subject, person, place, event or thing)
  • Discussion or comments
This open source software was used to build Kete Horowhenua, which contains 1,400+ topics and 12,000+ images as well as other content.

I wish Atkinson had been given time to talk about how they (OCLS) were going to get people to participate in loading content, and the hurdles that they might be experiences. Unfortunately, he only talked about the software. Something to investigate...


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2 comments:

Deborah Fitchett said...

I don't know about OCLS, but Horowhenua presented at the LIANZA conference last year about their experiences getting content from their community (I blogged the presentation at the time).

Joann Ransom said...

Jo from Kete Horowhenua & Kete.net (New Zealand)

Motivating your community to contribute really is the crux of the issue - and will make the difference between a succesful uptake or otherwise.

We do extensive promotion in our community: lots of going out to groups and inviting groups in the library too. We make targeted presentations given specific examples demonstrating the value to the organisation Kete can be. We take a silo approach and try and bed Kete down into a particular sector before moving onto the next one.

Asking for help really worked well for us; our people LOVE helping us with this project. I have presented on the question of how we engaged our community to help with Kete at 2008 VALA conference; the conference paper can be viewed here: http://www.valaconf.org.au/vala2008/papers2008/31_Ransom_Final.pdf