This would be pretty cool, which is good since we’re headed in this direc­tion already.

Take this story: Entire Cities Recre­ated Using Thou­sands of Flickr Photos

“A group of researchers with Uni­ver­sity of Washington’s graph­ics and imag­ing lab­o­ra­tory (GRAIL) wanted to see if they could build a piece of soft­ware that would search the web for images of a par­tic­u­lar place and recre­ate that place in 3D in under a day.

They suc­ceeded, and the team, lead by Sameer Agar­wal, cre­ated a sim­u­la­tion of Rome using 150,000 images har­vested from photo-sharing web­site Flickr, and build a vir­tual model within a day.

The team also tested the soft­ware on the Croa­t­ian city of Dubrovnic and were able to recre­ate the entire old city, includ­ing all the build­ings and streets, within 22 hours.”>

Mix in local, dig­i­tized his­tory from the library and archives, the way DOK does with their Sur­face table app that reads your library card and retrieves his­tor­i­cal images of your neighborhood.

Mul­ti­touch Microsoft Sur­face: Cul­tural Her­itage Browser from Jaap van de Geer on Vimeo.

Top off with the com­ing wave of aug­mented real­ity apps for mobile devices, led by the “it’s already here” Yelp app for local reviews.

“Yelp’s new iPhone app is now the first iPhone App with Aug­mented Real­ity. It takes Yelp infor­ma­tion and over­lays it into the real-world. It’s actu­ally a secret easter egg (dis­cov­ered by Robert Scoble), which may be why Apple didn’t reject Yelp’s aug­mented real­ity app. We have screen­shots and a demo video to show you what this is all about.” [Mash­able]

And you get a glimpse of where vir­tual worlds, ubiq­ui­tous infor­ma­tion, and mobile broad­band access will con­verge. I can imag­ine walk­ing through Chicago neigh­bor­hoods (like Pull­man), around the Mall in Wash­ing­ton DC, and other places where libraries can add value to this type of experience.

If you feel infor­ma­tion over­load now, just wait until that infor­ma­tion flow mag­i­cally appears all around you in the real world and not just on a screen. Can librar­i­ans become part of users’ net­works and help fil­ter out some of the noise? Will libraries make their archives open and avail­able for these types of uses?

Shanachies Erik, Jaap, and Geert talk about the DOK Library

Jaap is the “head of inno­va­tion” at DOK — love that title

DOK = Library Con­cept Center

video of library man­ager Eppo tour­ing DOK
– showed Blue­tooth down­load sta­tion
– music pods
– video games (“The library can’t be with­out games.”)

it’s all about peo­ple — share the sto­ries to tell and make the stories

DOK sits on one side of “cul­ture square” — they named it that because they’re across from a movie and the­ater
there’s a lot of color in DOK because they believe this is impor­tant to lift peo­ple up, help moti­vate them to share their sto­ries
the staff offices on the top floor are totally open — not just open source, but open access to staff
have a “read­ing café” with the mag­a­zines
they put the timely read­ing mate­ri­als right near the food and coffee/café
the build­ing is a con­verted super­mar­ket — it’s con­crete but made attractive

the book­shelves don’t have a top shelf, so they seem more open
not col­lect­ing dust
shelf along the bot­tom to dis­play the books but can also use it to step up and reach the top shelf
Geert does the sig­nage — it’s attrac­tive and uses every­day lan­guage
the library has a very lux­u­ri­ous look but the book­cases are made of NDF (?)
spend the money on ser­vices, rather than book­cases
the children’s col­lec­tion is on book­shelves that are on wheels, so mov­able; allows them to move the col­lec­tion for pro­gram­ming
all of the children’s book­shelves are green so easy to iden­tify
the kids can stand on the book­shelves and it’s okay
one sign in the adult col­lec­tion uses an image from Psy­cho :-p

their elec­tronic sig­nage runs on Nin­tendo Wiis because it’s cheap!
cost about a quar­ter of the price, plus can use the Wiis for game tournaments

the floor has a rub­ber tex­ture so playful

an area where peo­ple can learn lan­guages
it’s a quiet area and an open study room

snoic chairs (music pods)
an enrich­ing expe­ri­ence that goes beyond just lend­ing out CDs
can sit in the chairs and lis­ten to music that only you hear
the touch­screens are hooked up to the library’s net­work, so can watch movies

the “romance room” is com­pletely red
kids like to come study in this room and use the library’s wifi

they dim the lights to make peo­ple look bet­ter (rather than harsh, bright lights)

peo­ple can take food and drink from the café any­where in the building

offer an art col­lec­tion for check­out, with paint­ings out for dis­play
have a cat­a­log online where res­i­dents can reserve paintings

projects they’re work­ing on now:
started a new “sci­ence and inno­va­tion” depart­ment to look at dif­fer­ent ways to bring peo­ple together around data

1. hacked a Microsoft Sur­face table
worked with Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­sity in Delft
devel­oped two appli­ca­tions for it, one of which is fin­ished
sec­ond one, still work­ing on, will be a news quiz — users will work together using the table
brings peo­ple together around top­ics of interest

first appli­ca­tion uses spe­cial bar­codes on the library card
put your card on the table and it reads your address, shows you his­tor­i­cal images for your address
totally freak­ing cool video of how this works, nar­rated by the stu­dent who devel­oped the software

can also use a map appli­ca­tion to find images from any street
also includes video
can sort images

because the table can detect objects, it can detect shapes, so there’s a ring you can place on top that acts as a magnifier

2. DOK Agora “Sto­ry­board of your life“
works with mate­r­ial from the Delft Archive
idea is to get peo­ple to share their sto­ries
a col­lec­tion of sto­ry­telling tools for peo­ple vis­it­ing the library
let you see, hear, and watch other peo­ples’ sto­ries, as well as tell your own
includes maps, paint­ings, etc.
the library is a col­lec­tion of sto­ries and cul­ture — how can we get the community’s sto­ries into the library?

huge screen with small sto­ries on it that you can make larger
national archive, local archive
they pick a story, scan their library pass, the story is linked to it, go down one level to the sto­ry­telling area
this is where any­one in the com­mu­nity can add a pic­ture, audio, video, etc. to the archive
when the archive has grown, they have a launch party for it (for spe­cific topics)