Monday, November 21, 2005

Where's My Train?

I like this...it's an interactive map showing the real locations of the suburban trains in the city of Dublin. The other one, the real one in Ireland. The creator, a Dublin fellow, says he takes the realtime data from Irish Rail, smooshes (my word, not his) it a bit and maps it onto Google Maps.

Most inventive and useful one would think...wonder what it looks like on a handheld? If only libraries still had bookmobiles.....there could be maps with little icons of buses making the rounds. It wouldn't be quite so exciting watching the book you placed on hold wending its way towards you, would it? Or perhaps it would if you were 43rd on the list for a much-wanted book. Or could the location of reference librarians be mapped on a university campus--help is on the way!

It's interesting to watch presence develop on the web. I wish libraries were doing more in this area. Lists of content or services or buildings do not a presence make.

1 comment:

David said...

Tails is playing around with something like this using Google Maps
http://www.talis.com/libmap/

Ya gotta love their new portal page http://research.talis.com/2005/whisper/ plus their company blog http://blogs.talis.com/panlibus/.

I see this stuff and think, this is where we need to have been