This document summarizes several emerging technologies being used in academic libraries in 2015. It describes projects using 3D imaging of historical manuscripts, interactive maps created with conductive ink, musical instruments that tell their own life story through recorded audio, and interactive life history books for elderly residents created with a tangible memories app. It also mentions projects using physical charts to display real-time data, marginalia machines to analyze archival materials, and 3D wearable library cards.

1. Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries 2015,
Trondheim
New Materialities Andrew Prescott
University of Glasgow

2. Roll from the English royal chancery, 1379-1380

3. 14th-century ‘pipe roll’ from the English Royal Exchequer now made
available via the Anglo-American Legal Tradition website at the O’Quinn
Law Library, University of Houston:
aalt.law.uh.edu

4. The Benedictional of St Æthelwold, London, British Library, Add.
MS. 49598, ff. 90v-91: Blessing for the feast of St Ætheldreda

5. 3D imaging of the eighth-century St Chad Gospels at Lichfield Cathedral by
Professor William Endres, University of Kentucky: lichfield.as.uky.edu

6. yourfry.com
Stephen Fry’s Challenge:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqahjME6Tbg

7. Sara Weigold, The Book of Bipolarity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9eoUycIk5M

8. Cathy Horton’s interactive shipping forecast map, made using conductive ink:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGSQ8ESZRA

9. Conductive ink and electric paint: Bare Conductive
bareconductive.com

10. Conductive ink used to draw (or write) a
circuit - or paint a light switch on the wall

11. Mike Shorter and Jon Rogers, A Touch of Fry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=13&v=jCBoKblmhds
http://productresearch.dundee.ac.uk

12. Eduardo Kac, Lagoglyph Sound System, proof of concept, 2012
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCYn7oQlLiA

13. Fabio Lattanzi Antinori, Dataflags: Lehmann Brothers (2014)
Somerset paper, screenprint, data from the last ten years of Lehman Brothers’ financial trading, electric paint, soundsystem,
custom code, voice soprano (Madge).
http://www.fabiolattanziantinori.com/dataflags_V_A.php

14. Dalziel and Pow, Engaging Space exhibit at Retail Design Expo, London, March 2015. A
combination of data projection and conductive ink is used to create an interactive mural:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poA9bZ76iJ

15. The reinvention of the codex, paper and ink by modern artists is a reminder that books are artefacts.
Each one is a iunique object, like a museum object. The way in which different owners treated the
illustrations in the Voyage to Jamaica by Sir Hans Sloane tells us a lot about eighteenth-century attitudes
to Empire.
But to reconstruct this, we need to examine each copy of the book.

16. “Aestheticode is a machine readable and human readable aesthetic encoding system. It is similar in function to a barcode,
except it looks like a Sol LeWitt wall painting or Gerhard Richter's window in the Cologne Cathedral. Its complexity is
similar to that of morse code”.
Aestheticodes: aestheticodes.com.

17. carolanguitar.com
Steve Benford’s introduction to the project is at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyjgn5YO1Lk
“We’ve made a musical instrument that tells you its
own life story. It captures its history and will play it
back to you”

18. Tangible Memories project: http://tangible-memories.com
• An app that enables residents to work with families and care staff to create their own
interactive life history books or group history books. Stories are recorded into the book and
played back by simply scanning pages of the book.
• An interactive rocking chair that enables residents to listen to audio including sounds of
nature, poems and favourite music.
• A tactile patchwork cushion which can be programmed to play favourite music or audio
stories – personalized for individual residents, using printed images and visual recognition
software.
• A ‘pick up to play’ music app, that makes listening to a memory filled music playlist as
simple as picking up the phone.
• The use of Virtual Reality headsets that can transport residents to local landmarks and places
they are no longer able to visit.

19. Physical Charts, a project by Microsoft Research Cambridge for the Tenison Road
community project that set out to encourage civic engagement with locally generated
data, such as surveys on traffic and air quality. The result is a mechanical pie chart
made from slices of sheet plastic attached to a central motor and bar chart constructed
from motorised measuring tapes, both of which animate to display real-time data.
They are now on display in a shop window in Cambridge.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/physicalcharts/

20. The Benedictional of St Æthelwold, London, British Library, Add.
MS. 49598, ff. 90v-91: Blessing for the feast of St Ætheldreda

21. German books owned by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the British Library:
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/european/2014/05/coleridges-german-books.html

22. Tom Schofield, Marginalia Machine, part of the Poetics of the Archive
project based around the archive of the publishers Bloodaxe Books at
the University of Newcastle:
bloodaxe.ncl.ac.uk

23. YourFry Toronto:
3D wearable interactive library cards:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX1Y5oiibeI
The Library as Virtual Catalyst: befriending people from the past:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDccXjRZV6Y
Duncan Jordanstone College of Design Dundee
Hack the University:
https://youtu.be/Gfh18uidY4o