Tim’s Online Bible Dictionary Project has had me thinking about things back from my computer science background. Several of the people I used to work with are involved with the New Zealand Digital Library project.
The New Zealand Digital Library project is a research programme at The University of Waikato whose aim is to develop the underlying technology for digital libraries and make it available publicly so that others can use it to create their own collections.
Tim’s project sounds to me like a digital library – a collection of various resources (text only?) with a layer of meta-data (key words, hyperlinks, related articles) on top creating a variety of ways of accessing that information.
Recently I’ve started thinking more (and writing a bit) about technology and social justice – both in general and with respect to posthuman technologies. So I was interested to see that Prof. Ian Witten (a supervisor of mine back in the mid-90s) of the NZDL had written a paper on digital libraries and society from a humanitarian perspective. You can find the PDF here: Digital Libraries and Society.
Ian was recently awarded The Namur Award for “an outstanding contribution with international impact to the awareness of social implications of information technology.” Excellent.
