Demonstrating use of registries

The OCKHAM team organised a meeting in Seattle this week to bring together registry providers and some potential registry users. The potential users were some of the projects funded by the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) and included the New Jersey Institute of Technology's the General Recommendation Engine, Utah State University's Services to Link Opencourseware Repositories and the NSDL (one of these services is the wonderfully-named Scrumdidilyumptious) and the Pathways resources of the NSDL itself.

The meeting was held in the Seattle Public Library's Central Library, an innovative building which was opened in 2004. One of its features is a 'Book Spiral' which connects four floors of books and is decorated by Dewey Decimal numbers set into the floor, to help library users find their way around.

The Midwinter Meeting of the American Library Association is taking place in Seattle. This is a huge affair, with 15,000 librarians attending, according to the Seattle Times which published an editorial on the importance of librarians on 19 January. The generally positive buzz about libraries and librarians in Seattle was refreshing.