 |  |  |  |
 |  |  |
Well, the concept of mashups has a lot of potential, but given the limitations of this exercise, I didn't see any of the Flickr mashups that had anything much beyond novelty interest for a library. And the only thing that really seemed even workable for the purposes of this exercise was the spelling one. (Though that was really cool.)
The mashups I've seen in a library or archive context that make much more sense have to do with mashing up images from a special collection (say pictures of historic barns) with map information. Take a look at Barns of Winnebago County at the Oshkosh Public Library.
Or again, if you are going to have a library Flickr account and post images from library events you could do a mosaic wall sort of thing, but this seems kind of on the edges as far as core library services and innovation around this Web 2.0 idea.
An impressive but nonlibrary mash up is Follow the Oil Money. This website creates a visual relationship map of the contribution network between politicians and oil companies that donate to their campaigns. The data comes from sources including the Sunlight Labs API, the Democracy In Action API, the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Center for Responsive Politics, and GovTrack.us. I'd like to see some of the library world's larger players doing beefy stuff like this. Librarian trading cards -- not so much. Though perhaps those have their place.
Update 10/7/08. Once again, I have to moderate my previous comments. I've had a look at the librarian trading cards created for the librarians at Carleton College. I have to say, I found them very amusing. But then, I'm an old fogey librarian, not a college kid. I'd like to know if they are effective in getting more students or faculty to contact the librarians (I assume that was the idea?).
