My Discoveries
The Internet has been transformed from a static information source into a platform for interaction and communication. With My Discoveries, AquaBrowser combines all the richness and quality of your library collection with the wisdom of the crowds and free collaboration of your library community. My Discoveries is the social library realized in AquaBrowser.
“My Discoveries from Medialab is the first technology specific to libraries I’ve seen get the social stuff right.”
– Meredith Wolfwater, Information wants to be free.
User Contributed Content
For the end user, My Discoveries offers the ability to tag, review and rate all of the library’s materials. This allows users to contribute their own knowledge and opinions about library materials, benefiting patrons and librarians alike; by reviewing, tagging and networking, the user takes an active role in the catalog.
For the library organization, the advantages are twofold: your users enjoy the freedom to label and organize their information world, while at the same time your library engages in ‘crowdsourcing’: enriching your catalog with valuable information to make it a better experience for everyone.
User Lists: the organic catalog
With My Discoveries, your users can create any number of lists, add items to them, and organize them in different ways. A key advantage to these lists is that users can make them public, so that patrons can find them with AquaBrowser, just like any other library resource.
The possibilities are endless. Anyone can share lists of hand picked items about a certain subject. Librarians can construct resource lists for current events, popular works or in-library events. Professors can create reading lists for their students.
Tons of content preloaded
To start off with a very rich set of user contributed content, AquaBrowser offers LibraryThing tags to be pre-loaded into My Discoveries. LibraryThing is vibrant online community, with over 53 million tags (and growing), all ready to be connected to your catalog. Users can search, discover and refine by these tags, too!
A global library community
My Discoveries implements a revolutionary concept: instead of keeping user content at the library level, your library can share user content with other institutions all over the world. This sharing, like other user behaviors, can be controlled via an administrative interface.
Built-in Edition Grouping
My Discoveries’ FRBR-like Built-In Edition Grouping groups like titles together so users can find all editions and formats by the same author in the same result. So whether the user wants a book, book on CD or large print, all editions display as one result. See the results for this search for Notebook