dpla

As you may or may not know, the Berkman Center at Harvard University is sponsoring an initiative called the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), and over the past few months people have been creating "beta-sprints" in an effort to describe, illustrate, and demonstrate what such a library might look like. See -- http://bit.ly/irjzqO

While I am not yet aware of a comprehensive list beta-sprint proposals, the DPLA folks are encouraging "sprinters" to share their submissions. I wrote a submission called "Use & Understand". From the Executive Summary:

  Use & understand is an evolutionary step in the processes and
  functions of a library. These processes and functions enable the
  reader to ask and answer questions of large and small sets of
  documents relatively easily. Through the use of various text
  mining techniques, the reader can grasp quickly the content of
  documents, extract some of their meaning, and evaluate them more
  thoroughly when compared to the traditional application of
  metadata. Some of these processes and functions include:
  word/phrase frequency lists, concordances, histograms
  illustrating the location of words/phrases in a text, network
  diagrams illustrating what author say "in the same breath" when
  they mention a given word, plotting publication dates on a
  timeline, measuring the weight of a concept in a text, evaluating
  texts based on parts-of-speech, supplementing texts with
  Wikipedia articles, and plotting place names on a world maps.
  
  http://bit.ly/ojWmzN

Fun with librarianship in a digital age!

-- 
Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame