Description The term “Smart Library” has recently been used more frequently, for labeling a vision of libraries of the future (examples see Fig. 1 and 2), in particular as part of the so called “Smart City” concept. This concept addresses the integration of digital processes and informational feedback loops in the public infrastructure and claims this integration to be a desirable state, in which cities become “smarter”, i.e.

The role of libraries in the 21st century is changing. One indication is the emergence of new services and job profiles: libraries offer services to support researchers throughout the creation, publication, dissemination and discovery of their research.

Sharing data publicly adds value to research. The same data can potentially be used for new questions in different contexts. Furthermore, by making data publicly available, results become more transparent.

Vince Smith has produced a nice flyer for my forthcoming talk at The Natural History Museum on March 17th (11-12). It will be a busy day as I'm also talking at the British Library in the evening (6pm - 8:30pm), for which Sarah Kemmitt has produced a flyer, and set up a discussion forum on Nature Network. With all this effort going into the artwork, I'd better actually come up with something useful to say.

Duncan Hull alerted me to his paper "Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web" ( PloS Computational Biology , doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204). Here's the abstract: It's an interesting read, and it also cites my bioGUID project.

Just a quick not to make a link between David Shorthouse's post about taxonomic consensus and distributed version control (Taxonomic Consensus as Software Creation), and Galen Charlton's article in The Code4Lib Journal (Distributed Version Control and Library Metadata). Some interesting food for thought here. Both mention Git.