About Us

Labs is inventing the future of the public library. The project is about building web prototypes and discovering concepts to help clarify the role of a public library in a world of linked data networks.

The Labs project was created by Libraries.fi in association with the Helsinki City Library's web department. Labs operates within the international library community, taking advantage of open source software and contributing to open development processes.

We are experimenting with

• the discovery of books and music in the web and the usability of library web applications,
• greater utilization and opening up of rich library metadata,
• integrating the metadata into web sites,
• the presentation of information in visualizations and interactive user interfaces,
• finding the role of the library in a semantic web, as well as the library's place in social networks and search applications
• the essence of the physical library space and its augmentation with web data,
• real time information as an aid to discovery,
• mined usage information as the basis for content recommendations.