Working with Remix Culture: A Fad or the Future

The reuse or "remix" of digital content is one of the hottest topics in web development today. Not a day passes in which there is not some new "mashup" or novel combination of data or services. Although many of these developments are faddishly entertaining, the potential for transformative development for teaching and learning is profound. (Is it too much of a vulgarization to argue that scholarship itself is a form of remix?) This session will provide an introduction to remix culture using two primary examples: 1) mixing Flickr and Google Maps and 2) mixing art imagery and data via the Scholar's Box, a tool that gives users gather/create/share functionality, enabling them to gather resources from multiple digital repositories in order to create personal and themed collections and other reusable materials that can be shared with others for teaching and research. Consider the longer term implications of remix for education and research and hear about a strategy for constructively engaging with remix culture: how we can educate the next generation of librarians to understand remixing and how we might make library content and services reusable to facilitate new educational and scholarly uses.