I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT THAT PIECE OF EARTH: ENABLING INTERACTION WITH GEOSCIENCE MAP DATA

Generally, the technologies and designs of Web 2.0 have altered the way users engage information and have thus elevated the expectations they bring to information sources online. And while the Web 2.0 paradigm is at work in some pockets of academia, it is missing or undeveloped in others. Libraries, who typically must concern themselves not with the next big information thing but rather the next 100 years of information, have been slow to engage the more transient world of modern web content interaction and its social networking structures.

It doesn't have to be that way, however, and one of the staples of Web 2.0, the mashup, offers the model that can let geoscience libraries in particular have their long-term, secured, controlled digital geospatial collections and their user/patron-empowerment, too. Without a heavy shift of infrastructure.

This session will discuss present work being done at Purdue University Libraries on how modern or historic geospatial data can be disseminated to, then consumed by, users who have grown accustomed not only to intuitive, efficiently-styled web applications, but also to the notion that these online apps are most useful when information can be added back to them via forum discussions, annotations, or other user-feedback mechanics. Specifically, ways to add user interaction and the social flow of para-information using xml mark-up of text and open source map server software will be discussed.