Lost In The Tubes

So I was sitting at Denny’s – the one on Harlem & Chicago Aves. – and I decided to check in on both Foursquare and Gowalla.  The location didn’t exist on either app, so I created it for both.  When I did this on Gowalla, it popped up a message telling me that to become the founder of this location, I needed to drop an item.  For those of you who don’t use Gowalla, it has items – random things you can pick up and drop at locations when you check in (another example of Gowalla “telling stories”).  For those of you that do use Gowalla:  There’s an electric guitar sitting at the Denny’s on Harlem & Chicago for anyone who wants it.  And that’s when it hit me – scavenger hunts!  Libraries can use Gowalla to stage community scavenger hunts, as a fun way to get people involved in the library and also to highlight the library’s connections to the community.  I don’t know if the GPS on smartphones is precise enough for a library to be able to use Gowalla to host a scavenger hunt within the confines of the library building itself (I don’t think you can have multiple locations within a single building) but Gowalla is also open-source, so maybe it could be adapted to the purpose.  And this is where QR codes would come in really handy!

Last Tuesday evening, my Advanced Archival Management class went to the Oak Park Public Library to tour their special collections.  Leaning against the wall in the secure room that houses the bulk of their Frank Lloyd Wright collection is a large aerial photograph of Oak Park, dated in the mid-1990s, and mounted to foam core.  There are a whole lot of colored pins stuck in it – it was a library promotion where patrons could stick a pin in the places where they live, work, play, etc.  It’s a visualization of the geography of the library patrons’ lives.  It occurs to me that this is what Foursquare and Gowalla are doing, globally and across all communities.  And libraries can use that.

One semester with Prof. Stephens, and I’m already seeing the world in a completely different way!

Random thought (speaking of QR codes…):  In my 701 class, in the Organization of Knowledge, and in my archives classes, we’ve spent a great deal of time debating the question, “What is a document?”  I think we’ve all read that one article by that one guy who thinks that a gazelle is a document; ridiculous, right?  But then I think, “What if you put a QR code on the gazelle, how would that affect its nature-as-document?”  :-/

~ by JohnK on March 23, 2010 .