DataBC

Guest blog post by Jacqueline Van Dyk, Director, Libraries and Literacy, Ministry of Education

On September 21^st, 2012, in partnership with the  BC Libraries Cooperative and the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia,  the Ministry of Education’s Libraries and Literacy Branch developed a one-day summit to explore opportunities for open data learning and leadership in BC libraries.  Engaging speakers and sessions included how-to presentations, moderated panels on best practices, storytelling, other uses of open data and open data leadership for librarians. Open data newbies, early adopters and the curious all left this summit thinking about the possibilities for using open data to support communities of users and libraries. Here is a recap by Loren Mullane from the DataBC Team.

There is no doubt that those who attended and/or presented were inspired and the stream of thought did not lose momentum. Here are some thoughts from the day and action items that are already underway.

Herb Lainchbury shares his thoughts from the day and on the opportunity for libraries:

“As I prepared my talk for this conference, I knew many of the participants would be professional librarians and archivists.  It occurred to me how important libraries and archives are to our societies, and how the challenges we face in the open data movement are the very same challenges that the proponents of the original library idea must have faced.”

Herb Lainchbury’s blog

Jonathan Jacobsen posts about ‘the natural fit’ between open data and librarians in his blog andorno

“…’Find, Use and Share.’ This reminds me of my first year in library school. The same principles were taught then. Clearly there is a natural fit between open data advocates and users and librarians.”

Jonathan Jacobsen’s blog

The Ministry of Education has also been inspired and is actively working on an exciting project. The outcome of the project is to develop an online tool or ‘ best practices guide’ that can be used by school or library organizations that want to begin or expand community experiences in open data use. This will happen in collaboration with field experts to design the core contents and suitable experiences for organisers and event participants. It will include a basic checklist of functions for event organisation as well as introduce users to a range of value added applications for use or as models for development.

Participants from the summit said this in their feedback survey:

“One item of interest was the idea to involve youth in our rural community in a hackathon, perhaps in conjunction with our local school, but would need a “how to” guide first.”

“This was a general hum in the room; we would love to host a hackathon, but have no idea how to!”

“It is always wonderful to see initiatives and needs meeting up together.”

Visit the Open Data Learning Summit website for links to the presentations from the day, tools and resources to get started, mashup tools, and hackathon projects.

What does library leadership in open data look like? See what I had to say in my guest blog on DataBC.

The BC Libraries Cooperative is busy working on a ‘hackathon’ project. Currently they are identifying partners and themes… Watch for more news on this initiative.

For further information on open data and libraries, see the Open Data Learning Summit website. Also stay tuned for resources to be added to that website.

And finally, thank you to all who participated in the Summit. I hope through hearing about what inspired some of our participants, you will continue to keep the dialogue about open data going throughout your library, organization, and community.