Paul Hagon: Beyond the search box - different ways of exploring collections

Paul Hagon will be presenting the session Beyond the search box - different ways of exploring collections at the Information Online conference.

He's been a web designer at the National Library of Australia for just over 2 years and his responsibilities in this position are:

• Interaction design, primarily for our collection discovery services
• maintaining relevant coding and accessibility standards
• monitoring user behaviour across our websites

Paul was previously a web developer at the Australian War Memorial for 7 years.

Exciting/Interesting projects & Achievements

The most exciting/interesting projects he's worked on at the National Library of Australia are:

• the Picture Australia redevelopment
• a lot of user testing and user analysis of the Libraries website
• newspaper digitisation project
• designing the interfaces to our oral history sound recordings and am currently working on a major overhaul to our entire discovery services

In his spare time he looks at how he can make collections relevant for mobile users and experimenting with building a few iPhone applications.

Papers & Presentations at Conferences

Paul has previously spoken at a smaller one day podcasting conference and to the Canberra web standards group, but this is his first presentation at a big multi day conference.

Paul told me that it's a little nerve wracking to be presenting at a conference of this size, but it's an extremely exciting opportunity to have his thoughts and ideas reach a broader audience.

Luckily his talk is on the first morning of the conference so people's minds will still be fresh and he can then sit back and enjoy the rest of the conference once his talk is over.

Blogs and Social Networks

He says he's not a prolific blogger, but posts things of interest at www.paulhagon.com generally trying to focus on things related to web development in libraries and museums and it's often the place where he tries out experiments to get a bit of feedback.

Paul created a twitter account in early 2007, but didn't really start using it much until 6 months ago. Up until then many of his contacts didn't use it (and still don't), but by using it and becoming part of the community, you meet people and learn a lot. It's all about participating but not obsessing about it.

His most active social network is Flickr which he loves because it satisfies his creative passions and inspires his mind to more new ways of looking at things than he had ever imagined. You can find Paul around the social networks at:

• twitter.com/paulhagon
• flickr.com/photos/paulhagon
• delicious.com/paulhagon
• slideshare.net/paulhagon
• linkedin.com/in/paulhagon

Combining Historical Artefacts & New Technology

As you can tell from the places Paul's worked at he loves working in collecting agencies because there are so many interesting items and artefacts just begging for new ways of interpreting and finding them. he says they are places where you can do your job and as a side benefit, learn so much more about our past.

It's this serendipitous discovery that he's trying to replicate on the web by moving data 'beyond the search box' and making it accessible via API's (Application programming interfaces) where it can be discovered in places users wouldn't normally associate with a library or collecting institution.

Paul looks forward to seeing as many of you as he can at his presentation and having a chat with you during the conference.

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