I’ve been given a heads-up on a new site from SLIC and CILIP in Scotland, which has been developed by the Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR) at the University of Strathclyde.

Scotland’s Information is a service to help identify and locate Scotland’s wealth of collections held in libraries, archives and museums.

Although the site is live now, it’s official launch will be on 24th October 2008, the centenary of CILIP in Scotland.

One could be flippant and note that this is just another Google Maps mashup, which it is, but this is a good example of producing something much greater than the sum of it’s parts.  Google Maps mashups have only been around for three years – Google announced their API in June 2005, as we covered here on Panlibus – yet they are a widely used tool on the web and a key part of many a web site that users are familiar and comfortable in using.  It is amazing to note how rapidly the click/drag/zoom metaphor for interacting with a map became the de facto way to do it.

Back to Scotland’s Information, this site draws together a wealth of information about libraries, archives and museums in Scotland and the topics, people and organisations they represent.

What is in my opinion different and very useful in the way the site works is how you can filter your way through this data (often with the use of tag clouds) to arrive at a map containing pins for each location (museum, library, or archive) that can help you.  For instance this is the result of clicking on Robert Burns in the People tag cloud – ‘Information collections about Robert Burns (1759-1796)’.  35 locations associated with that famous Scot, which can then be limited further for those with wheelchair and/or internet access.

A final link in the chain is that from information about individual collections, there is a link through to the relevant OPAC or search interface.  I would suggest that this could be made even more intuitive, especially if a user has arrived at a link by filtering on a person or subject, by making use of the Silkworm Directory service and it’s API to deep-link in to those collections, directly delivering the results of a relevant search.

A great start, that from day one will deliver a valuable service to those visiting, interested in, and residing in Scotland.  It will be interesting to see how it develops.