Finally a public library in the Netherlands decides to go 2.0!
On march 13, 2008 the public library of Amsterdam proudly presented their new social web competible search engine: the AquaBrowser. I wonder if the name has something to do with all the canals in Amsterdam…
Anyway, the users will be able to tag titles in the catalogue, make their own lists, share them with other users and in the future also write reviews on titles. The tagging will open nieuw search opportunities for books, dvd’s and cd’s.
In use is the MyDiscoveries system, that requires a log in before making use of the social web services.
What’s special about the AquaBrowser searchengine is that it does not only search through the collections of the public library, but that also through ‘Muziekweb’ - the biggest music collection of the Netherlands, the Amsterdam UIT-office which is some kind of event agenda, seven national newspapers and six magazines (that were not further mentioned) and even more sources, neither of them further mentioned.
The idea is that as soon as other libraries start using the MyDiscoveries system, they can share the tags, searchwords and else. Besides, the system also offers the opportunity of automatically add the tags to the huge online datbase of LibraryThing that already has about 20 million user tags and 13 milion books.
Also worth mentioning is that even people with bad sight were considered by the Amsterdam public library, the program BrowseAloud was installed to read out the texts.
Ah, well done public library Amsterdam! Feels good to be 2.0, doesn’t it?
Sources (in Dutch):
