Taking part in a conference run by the National Digital Archives Programme in Taiwan. I have been working with them for several years as part of the Culturemondo project and it is great to finally to meet them in their home country.

The conference has a selection of some great speakers: Seb Chan, Jennifer Trant and others. Jennifer talked about the recent development within the Steve Museum project. They have built a Facebook widget that allows users to invite friends to tag art in facebook. It is a great little tool and maybe a new generation of widgets for an audience that love art or culture. You can read her blog on the conference and the sessions.

Seb talked about his really pioneering social tagging work at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. He is taking further the work he has done with his team to open up access to their online collections. What is really interesting here is that the site is constantly evolving as they analyse and consider what information the system is collecting from users and how they use the site. They use this data to scope plans for the way the site develops and are looking at ways now of automating the process of grouping tags into ‘who / what / when’ categories using Calais. It makes clear that value that can be gained from bringing data sets together to extract new meanings.

Other interesting speakers included Cassey Bisson talking about his project called Scriblio which is working with open source software and library catalogues.