Video Walls Report

Some college libraries are installing large-scale video walls to share digital materials and facilitate collaboration. Including my alma mater, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Read the full article from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://chronicle.com/article/Colleges-Look-to-Big-Screen/131609/

Some of my favorite quotations...

"More and more goes on in the virtual world, and people are just staring at screens," says Gregory D. Hager, a professor of computer science and chair of the department at Johns Hopkins, who is working on the wall together with library officials. "It's sort of a fracturing process." As more and more educational content is available online, he argues, the university needs to pay attention to the benefits of collaborative work on the campus. "It's about people interacting with people, building the community of scholars."

Kel Guerin, a doctoral student in computer science who serves as my guide, pulls up a few projects that he and other programmers are building for the wall. One simply displays two high-resolution pictures side by side, to let researchers compare them. He puts two medieval manuscripts on the screen. Sayeed Choudhury, associate dean for research data management, who is helping to lead the project, says an art-history researcher asked for that function, complaining that the best she could do otherwise was to put two slides side by side on a light table. "She said, 'I want to be able to dance with the manuscripts,'" says Mr. Choudhury.The screens aren't standard TV's you could pick up at Best Buy. They are designed to deliver pictures in extremely high resolution.

"When people come into libraries, they expect to see books, and they identify the libraries with books even though they've been shifting so much to digital materials," says Joan K. Lippincott, associate executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information, a group that promotes digital innovation on campuses. "Libraries need to find a way to make digital information visual so that people come to understand the kind of information that's being developed in digital formats."

I especially love that last quotation. People don't want to lose libraries, and books on a shelf is a quick way to show materials. It's important that we continue to develop new digital media to share our collections as more of them are found online.