Paul Hagon 2010 Mover and Shaker

 

Mover and ShakerCongratulations to Paul Hagon from the National Library of Australia (and VALA2010 speaker) for being recognised as a the first Australian Mover and Shaker by the Library Journal.

Paul HagonNow in its ninth year, the LJ’s Movers & Shakers spotlights librarians from all corners of the library world. Acknowledged as a major honour within the library community, Paul is the first Australian to be recognised as an LJ Mover & Shaker. Paul’s nomination recognises the world class work he has done with library mashups and APIs. To quote:

Paul uses his skills as a web developer to mash together digitised images from libraries, museums, and archives around the world, helping to expose some real treasures from library collections in beautiful, useful, and interesting ways.

At VALA2010 Conference Paul delivered two papers “Making our catalogue as easy as 1, 2, 3“, and “Everything I know about cataloguing I learned from watching James Bond“, as well as delivering a VALA L-Pate Series presentation on “Library Mashups and APIs“.

Both the VALA Committee, and the VALA2010 Programme Committee, would like to congratulate Paul for this wonderful achievement.

Paul’s Movers & Shaker citation is now available on the Library Journal web site.

VALA2010 L-Plate Session 2 Library Mashups and APIs

VALA L PlateMonday 8 February, 13:30 – 14:00

More and more libraries are using freely available open source APIs to add value and functionality to their existing online collections and content.  An application programming interface (API) is an interface implemented by a software program to enable interaction with other software, similar to the way a user interface facilitates interaction between humans and computers.

Presenter: Paul Hagon

In his own words Paul Hagon is a web developer at the National Library of Australia. Before this he worked at the Australian War Memorial so he has acknowledged there is something he loves about working at cultural institutions. He has been playing around on the web since the days of Netscape 1.0 and has worked in the business professionally since 1999. When he’s not on the computer you can find him out running or riding. You can follow Paul’s activities here or at Flickr, Twitter or delicious..

Paul is one of the leading figures in the library mashup / API frontier in Australian. In 2010 Paul was the first Australian to be recognised by the Library Journal as a Mover and Shaker for Technical Leadership. VALA is therefore delighted Paul kindly agreed to talk to the topic of library mashups and APIs at the VALA2010 L Plate Series.

  • Content from this L Plate Session will soon be made available online.

 

VALA2010 Session 1 Graham

VALA20120Making our catalogue as easy as 1, 2, 3

VALA 2010 CONCURRENT SESSION 1: Discovery
Tuesday 9 February 2010, 10:50 – 11:20
Persistent URL: http://www.vala.org.au/vala2010-proceedings/vala2010-session-1-graham

Bobby GrahamVALA Peer Reviewed Paper

Director Web Publishing (Acting), National Library of Australia
http://www.nla.gov.au

Paul Hagon

Senior Web Designer, National Library of Australia
http://www.nla.gov.au

Please tag your comments, tweets, and blog posts about this session: #VALA2010

Abstract

A library’s catalogue is core to a library’s existence. The National Library of Australia recognises this and spends a great deal of time, energy and money on the data that goes into the catalogue. Less attention is spent on design and user experience. This changed in May 2008 when the National Library of Australia implemented VuFind as the new online catalogue. A year after this implementation, the Library reviewed the user behaviour and usability of the VuFind online catalogue. This paper outlines the process of that review, what the review has delivered and how we can use this information to meet the ever-increasing user expectations.