Web Annotation WG introductions

I'm Tim Cole, a librarian and member of the library and library school
faculties at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  I was a
principal on the Open Annotation Collaboration project and along with Rob
Sanderson, Paolo Ciccarese, and several others a founding member of the Open
Annotation Community Group. Annotation on the Web should allow users of
digital information to do everything they can do when annotating print
resources, plus a lot more. Having worked in an academic setting for 25
years now, I tend to approach annotation in terms of scholarly and
researcher-based use cases, but I still see as critical the need to identify
technical approaches and define best practices that are holistic, practical,
supportive of interoperability, and designed to work well on the Web.  I am
part of a group here at Illinois that is currently experimenting with adding
annotation functionality in the context of multiple digital library systems
and projects, e.g., the HathiTrust digital library, a proposed research
mathematics digital library project, and a multi-institution library of
digitized Renaissance emblem books. 

 

I look forward to contributing to the WG as able, while at the same time
learning a lot more about annotation and annotation technologies.

 

Tim Cole

University of Illinois at UC