Mashups - Week 11

The Reflect activity for this week was in response to Mashups. A mashup is essentially combining two or more pieces of data to create one, singular, new piece of data. Mashups can ultimately consist of anything, whether it be pictures, sound, video, or even a web-page. I first heard about mashups through songs on the radio. People all over the world combined popular songs to make new ones, various websites popped up and it even featured in movies like Pitch Perfect. The problem with pop-song mashups is obviously the copyright issues, although these songs exist they are not legal unless endorsed by the music company that owns the songs.

This leads me to the competition by Library Hack which asked participants to use data from Australian and New Zealand libraries to create something new. The purpose of this was to raise awareness about the amount of shareable content libraries have and encourage users to engage with the collection by creating something new. This is an ingenious way for libraries to expose their collections to a wider audience, not only do artists and amateur artists get to exercise their skills, but viewers as well.

My favourite mashup was by Gardey, who 'mashed up' two photographs and added text for a comical effect.

After having a laugh about the picture as a whole I start to ask myself some questions:
1. What is the original context of the diver in the photo?
2. What beach are the people below standing at?
3. What are the people looking up at in the original picture?
4. What year were these photos taken?
5. Who were the people in each of these photos?

It is these kinds of questions I think Library Hack were trying to elicit from the users. The mashups trigger curiosity in the viewer and leave them wanting to know more. How do they know more? By engaging with the collection! The competition by Library Hack shows the potential for libraries to extend their audience by utilising their creative commons and open access data.

An article by Nicole Engard relates mashups specifically to a library setting. The mashups discussed in the article are used to increase efficiency within the library rather than provide entertainment, but they are relevant and interesting nonetheless!


Reference.
All rights reserved by Gardey
The birth of stage diving and moshing in Australia
◾Photo 1: Taking the plunge at the Valley Baths, Brisbane, ca.1930-1940
◾Photo 2: Dirigible over tamarama, Hall & Co. Home and Away -34701
URL of this entry: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gardey/5775416779/

Gamification - Week 10

At the beginning of this week I was unaware of the extent of gamification within the library world, but after doing some research and reading a couple of articles I think that gamification definitely has its place within the library community. Gamification is defined as bringing elements of game design into a non-game context to help improve user experience. Ultimately I would like to work in an academic or public library and I can see the benefits of gamification in both settings.

Initially I was having a difficult time trying to relate gaming to a library environment. An article by Bohyun Kim discussed the applications of applying game dynamics to library services. An interesting point was made about creating a game that taps into people’s creativity and diligence. Games traditionally get harder as you progress to various levels. A person needs to utilise their creativity to pass these levels, but also use diligence to keep getting better. This article asserts that this type of interaction does not need to remain solely in the game world and can be transfered into the ‘real’ world, or even library environment.

Some brilliant suggestions are made in the article as to how to incorporate gaming within the library. While I wont state all the suggestions here, I will talk about one suggestion I found particularly interesting. With the rise of social media and libraries adapting their catalogues to incorporate social interaction with users ie. ratings, book reviews, etc. the idea of awarding ‘status points’ for posting something about the library to Facebook, or borrowing out a large number of books. Of course, the awarding of an essentially arbitrary points system is a form of extrinsic motivation which hopefully begin to trigger the intrinsic rewards of interest, peer acknowledgement and motivation, and pride. The idea of using status points is a small and simple way of adding gaming elements into the library setting to hopefully motivate users. Librarygame is a unique tool to help libraries modify their discovery interface and engage users. I'm looking forward to reading about other examples of gamification in libraries, if anyone has any suggestions please let me know!

Some personal apps I have used with elements of gamification are:

Duolingo - A free language learning tool (Manzana means apple in Spanish!)

Zombies Run! - I'm almost at 5k!

Cookie Clicker - I found this on Reddit. I don't understand the point of this game, but it definitely uses extrinsic motivation!