silkworm: tantalizing ideas and a few tools

“In the age of Google, Amazon and MSN, why is content in the library domain still so difficult and expensive to discover, access and share?” Read this long and informative white paper on how we can strive to make users experiences in the library more like the interconnected interactive experiences in the rest of their daily lives. More links over at It’s All Good, Common Library Environment, and some summaries and excerpts from Science Library Pad including one that just makes me salivate in a “the world might become the way I want it” way. Right now we’re mostly riding on buzz and good ideas, but it’s good to see the tech community helping create tools with the library community, as if, in some way, we were all part of the same thing.

‘Project Silkworm is based on the concept that library vendors must now collaborate in order to begin to deliver better services. This focus on participation (of both vendors and users) permeates the whole project and is captured in four key values: [1] Sharing and community over duplication and isolation, [2] Reuse over reinvention, [3] Openness and interoperability over exclusivity, [4] Experimentation over certainty…