Paul Stainthorp Schrödinger's cataloguer

Posts Tagged ‘Lincolnshire County Council’

Web history: Lincs to the Past

Posted on May 13th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

I’ve just returned from the formal launch event for Lincs to the Past, the new flagship website from Lincolnshire County Council which provides online access to “the cultural heritage collections” of the county.

The launch party was held at the Collection museum in Lincoln.

Lincs to the Past builds on a previous project of the county council called ‘Cultural Collections‘, which provided a unified search interface for resources held in various cultural-service catalogues (library, museums, archives).

The new website adds a whole load of interesting functionality on top of that single search, including:

Records collected together to form exhibitions
Very-high-quality digitised image browse (example) including rich navigation using Zoomify
User tagging and commenting
Faceted search (by date period, subject term, and domain: i.e. library, museum, or archives)
Online help

You can find Lincs to the Past at: www.lincstothepast.com

Tags: archives, Cultural Collections, events, history, humanities, images, launch, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, Lincolnshire County Council, Lincs to the Past, LISN, local history, museums, public libraries, search, The Collection, websites, Zoomify
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List of UK public libraries with downloadable e-books (mashup)

Posted on February 21st, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

This week, I spotted that my local public library service (Lincolnshire County Council) have launched an e-books service. Hooray for them – they’ve also recently upgraded all the PCs and introduced wifi in my local branch library.

With many local libraries being cut or placed under threat, and their technological relevance criticised (often ignorantly), even by the PM, it’s great to see investment going in to library technology in Lincolnshire.

The Lincolnshire county libraries e-books site is at: https://lincolnshire.libraryebooks.co.uk/

(It’s not obvious who provides this e-books platform, but it appears Warwickshire County Council—and possibly no-one else—has chosen the same provider.)

It got me wondering: how many UK public libraries currently provide an e-book download service?

To try and find out, I’ve created a (publicly-editable) Google spreadsheet wiki, containing the names of the 232 top-level local authorities in the UK, along with a column indicating whether or not they provide an e-book download service {1|0}, and columns for the URL and provider of that service.

At the time of writing, there are 48 public library e-book download services listed. If I’ve missed one that you know about, you can edit the spreadsheet yourself.