Fun, engaging, and useful – Mash Oop North, held today at the University of Huddersfield managed to combine all three. Originally aimed at librarians exploring mashups in the UK’s North, the event sold out in 24 hours (world record?) and attracted around 70 librarians and affiliated types from around the country. As one does, I managed to bump into the other Australians living in the UK within about 2 seconds of arriving.

Dave Pattern, who did a superb job of organising the event, talked about making library data work harder. 20% of keyword searches fail, so you need to guide students through the catalogue. Providing suggestions based on data becomes more powerful over time, as the data builds up. It is also possible to build good recommendation systems, using the data you already collect but don’t exploit. Reading lists and personal suggestions can also be valuable.

Interaction Brendan Dawes gave a fascinating talk about some of the small ideas he’s built and turned into larger projects. He emphasised importance of design, of simplicity and stripping away unimportant information. He showed a few examples of his work, including projects where people have been asked to create their own interface, sketching, and innovative ways to show connections between information.

Iman Moradi talked about gaming and a topic I’m very interested in, data visualisation. He was backdropped by one of the best slidedecks I have seen. There was a lot of deck envy in the room! There is real potential for involving design students in helping libraries to bring our data to life.

A Yahoo Pipes cookalong was disrupted by technology issues, but it was still good to get stuck into it again. It really is a useful tool and can be scaffolded from basic feeds to complex inputs in a fairly gentle way.

Informal discussions around a series of topics were presented runaround style, from information literacy to mobile devices and the Semantic Web, which these days is really more a discussion about Linked Data. Lightning talks followed, Owen Stephens discussed the history of interactive fiction, and discussed whether it could be a tool for information literacy. Joss Winn and Paul Stanthorp discussed a concept for using WordPress, Scriblio and Triplify to extract catalogue data and present it in new and interesting ways.

Prizes were on offer for suggesting ideas, and a team prize. It was really valuable to be able to spend an hour or so working with other librarians on building a mashup. Often learning can be so abstract, especially if you are trying to learn on your own, and I learnt more about Regex in an hour today than I have in trying to read about it previously.

This was really a great event – I came away enthused, looking forward to trying out new things, and having met some fantastic people. Onwards to the next Mash Oop, crisps and all!