English

Digital Services is a team in the development department at Oslo Public Library, also called the Deichman Library, located in the capital of Norway.

Our tasks range from software development, concept development, prototyping and user testing, to more advanced technological strategy planning. We keep  a special focus on the future of the library through the new library building planned for Oslo’s waterfront in 2017.

In this blog, we will document our experiences, both the positive and the negative, in order to share relevant information with other digital libraries, and  for the public to be able to follow our work and comment/make suggestions as they see fit.

Team members

• Asgeir Rekkavik
• Petter Goksøyr Åsen
• Benjamin Rokseth
• Anne-Lena Westrum

Ongoing projects

Oslo Public Library is powering up to present new digital services to our users when we open the new city library in a few years time. Based on the experiences from the Pode project we are now developing actual services we will present to our users.

The services are based on the RDF representation of the MARC records and the goal is to create an interactive station that presents the library catalogue in a new way.

Our experience is that the RDF representation gives us a more workable dataset, with lots of more opportunities to create services for our users, than the traditional MARC datasets provided by the ILS vendors.

The interactive station will connect the library catalogue with external data sources and present it in a visual and intuitive way through a touch screen based interface. The station will present the library holdings in a way we have never seen before!

We are also creating a national database of book recommendations written by library staff in Norway. The database is based on RDF, which in it’s turn is connected with the RDF representation of the MARC records. Based on an API the libraries can create different lists of recommendations to present on webpages, blogs, infoscreens and so on.

The interactive station is called “Aktive hyller” (Active shelfs) and the book recommendations is called “Bokanbefalinger”. You can find more about our RDF-store at data.deichman.no