Mashing Up The Library competition announced

Talis is pleased to announce the first competition intended to encourage innovation in the display, use, and reuse of data from and about libraries. The competition is open to all, and includes a first prize of £1,000 for the best entry. Read on for more information, and the respected panel of judges looks forward to reviewing a wide range of innovative entries.

In recent years, there has been an explosion in innovative methods of making libraries and their data work harder, reaching far beyond the boundaries of the traditional library management system.

From Jon Udell's early work with LibraryLookup to the current spate of Greasemonkey plug-ins and the structured exposure of web services by Talis, Amazon, Google and others, there are significant advances being made in the ways in which libraries offer their services to the outside world. At least as important is the revolution occurring outside the library, as those beyond the walls take and manipulate library data on their own.

This competition is intended to celebrate and showcase all that is best in these efforts to push library information out to existing audiences in new ways, or to reach totally new audiences with compelling and captivating applications.

At Talis, we announced our first set of Talis Platform web services last week, and while there is no requirement that your entries make use of them we'd obviously be pleased if you were at least to take a look whilst planning your entry.

The competition is open to anyone, anywhere. You do not need to work in a library, and you do not need to use any Talis product. You simply need to have an idea for a way to make better use of existing information from or about libraries, and an ability to turn that idea into a 'mash up' or other application that shows it off to good effect. For those with good ideas but without the technical skills to make them reality, we've set up a forum in which you can seek partners to assist.

The competition closes on 18 August 2006, and all of the details you need are here. Good Luck, and we look forward to discussion between now and then, and to reviewing all of your entries after the closing date.