Goodchild touches on a few interesting thoughts in the second article. I feel however, that this article is outdated. He refers to being able to access information across a network as something almost magical. He says something along the lines of a georeferenced library will have the ability to serve people across the globe using digital copies! On a similar note Goodchild also mentions the idea of not needing to duplicate material—an idea that we seem to be unable to escape from in each of our lectures.
Something that I found quite relevant however, is the sorting and cataloguing of photographs . The geolibrary offers a much more concrete system of organization. I really love this idea. Prior to the concept of a geolibrary I can only assume that if photographs were not assembled in a portfolio, compilation with a specific topic or in published book, it might be hard to find photos. Even within a publication, it seems like a tedious task to track down a photo that is most probably untitled and not georeferenced. I think that Flickr currently does a decent job at this task, but this database is limited to photographs only. As a user you can label your photos, add description and even add georeferenced data to help other users search for photos, as they might search for academic articles. The collection of photos, by user, visualized on a map is stimulating. Not quite as useful as I proposed in my other blog post, but still pretty cool.
I found this article somewhat repetitive, and perhaps unnecessary, but did address some fundamental reasons for and problems with geolibraries. I’m eager to see how the development of geolibraries evolves. It is perhaps, one of my more favourite concepts with respect to GIScience.
Andrew
Tags: geolibraries