Read about the history and legacy of the DX Lab now it has closed.

DX Lab 2015-2021

Read about ORBIT, the in-gallery experience revealing real-time use of the Library&#8217;s catalogue.

The ORBIT experiment

Explore a selection of Sydney subdivison plans in this innovative mapping experiment.

Making Sub Plot

Which way the Wind Blows is the first experiment using the publicly available Social Media Vizie API.

Which Way the Wind Blows

Can you help us by doing a survey about the Library&#8217;s Drug Info service?

Drug Info Project

Orb is an interactive VR experience for high school students visiting the State Library of NSW

Orb: VR experience

Experience Australian artworks featured in exhibitions from 1847-1900 through data visualisations, a search interface and an explorer.

Australian Art Catalogue Index

Immerse yourself in a text only experience using digitised data from the David Scott Mitchell Collection

Digital Drop-In: Poetry in Motion

Small Multiples join us for our next Digital Drop-In

Digital Drop-In: Small Multiples

Read about how we built Virtuoso, from the music notation research, the transcription process and application approach to the final musical output.

Creating Virtuoso

Explore the crimes of NSW from 1862 to 1900 in this contemporary data visualisation

We Are What We Steal

Overview of the new hierarchy interface for the Library&#8217;s collection website beta.

New collection hierarchies

Experience UTS Visual Communication Design Practice 3rd year students designing future collections online.

Design Practice

The experimental bird’s eye view of the digital collections from the State Library of NSW.

Building Aereo

The Diary Files is a new text based web experiment where you get to write the content.

Remington portable typewriter belonging to Damien Parer, Paramount News

Making The Diary Files

What does serverless mean? Get an insight into the DX Lab&#8217;s new cloud infrastructure

Going Serverless

Off the Shelf is now online and in our Vending Machine

Off the Shelf online

We welcome our next Digital Drop-In, Brett Tweedie.

Digital Drop-In: Brett Tweedie

This is Scout, a chatbot that finds books you might like to read in The Children&#8217;s Library.

Meet Scout the Chatbot

Off the Shelf: an interactive digital display of more than 650 images of book covers

Making Off the Shelf

Open A GLAM Lab Book has now been published

Open a GLAM Lab book

Children&#8217;s design-thinking workshop on the Wriveted book discovery chatbot

Wriveted Chatbot

Our next Digital Drop-In research project is with Meena Tharmarajah.

Digital Drop-In: Meena Tharmarajah

The DX Lab is thrilled to announce that Mauricio Giraldo is the 2019 DX Lab Fellowship winner.

Winner DX Lab Fellowship #3

Winner MAPDA Multimedia and Best in Show 2019.

Winner MAPDA

Unstacked can now be experienced on a Microfiche reader.

Unstacked microfiche experience

We are thrilled to offer the third DX Lab Fellowship

DX Lab Fellowship #3

A blog post on the technologies used to make #NewSelfWales

Making NewSelfWales

Read about the design process and fabrication of Thomas Wing-Evans&#8217; 80Hz Sound Lab interactive pavilion that was installed on the Library&#8217;s forecourt last October 2018. 

80Hz: part 3. Design

Find yourself in the results of #NewSelfWales or just enjoy a journey of browsing all 12,000 images in this feed.

The face of NSW

A collaborative research project with Tim Ross, a Comedian with a long-standing passion for architecture and design as part of our Digital Drop-In program.

Digital Drop-In: Tim Ross

The second of three posts in which we interview Julian Wessels from Sonar Sound who talks about the process of creating the audio for 80Hz Sound Lab.

80Hz: part 2. Sound and tech

Part one (of three) on the research and production for this architectural sound experience.

80Hz: Part 1. Research

A multi-channel, outdoor soundscape where you can &#8216;listen&#8217; to priceless paintings from the Library&#8217;s collection.

80Hz: Sound Lab

The Young Creative Technologists results of facial recognition research.

Young Creative Technologist 2018 screenshot

Facial recognition research

IDCA finalist for Best Website

An interactive 3D and VR experience of the Mitchell Library, merging point cloud data with the Library&#8217;s collection.</p>
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Mitchell Library, point cloud rendered as pixels, with collection photo.

Field of View

The design-thinking process behind the making of #NewSelfWales

#NewSelfWales ux research + testing

Share your portrait and become part of our opening exhibitions.

#NewSelfWales

The DX Lab is thrilled to announce that our next Digital Drop-In is filmmaker and artist Mike Daly. Mike is from Sydney and works with interactive film, live performance visuals, projection mapping, virtual reality and traditional filmmaking.

Digital Drop-In: Mike Daly

Read about how we designed and built our new DX Lab website.

New DX Lab Website

A visually rich interface using 10,902 digitised images, from the Visionaries collection representing significant Australian events, characters and places between 1759 &#8211; 1995.

Visionaries Explorer

The DX Lab in partnership with Macquarie Group opened a digital experience in the foyer of the Macquarie Group banking chamber.

New digital experience

Q and A with Carlos Arroyo, developer of Painting by Numbers.

Behind the Code

A digital experiment featuring nearly 300 original works by botanical artist Ferdinand Bauer.

Painting by Numbers

The winner of the Young Creative Technologist Award is Vignesh Sankaran for his facial recognition project.

Young CT winner

The DX Lab is thrilled to announce that Thomas Wing-Evans is the 2017 DX Lab Fellowship winner with his proposal 80Hz.

Fellowship winner

Something strange is in our foyer.  It&#8217;s a vending machine full of printed Library collection items!

Vending Library

17th and 18th century maps from the State Library of NSW&#8217;s collection brought to life as interactive 3D globes.

Making Meridian

We are excited to announce that we are collaborating with awe to put on two events during the Spark Festival in October. If you are interested in hearing more about AR,VR, MR (Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality) and wearables then you might want to attend one or both of these events. The Spark Festival is a thirteen day program of events and activities which showcases, supports and strengthens the vibrant startup and innovation ecosystem that exists in Sydney, and across all of

AR,VR+MR events

Young Creative Technologist Award The State Library of NSW’s DX Lab announces a unique opportunity for a young creative technologist to undertake an innovative project of their choice. The Young Creative Technologist Award, proudly supported by Macquarie Group, gives a young person aged 18-25 the opportunity to create an innovative digital experience utilising some of the Library’s seven million digitised images. The winner will receive a $10,000 cash prize. We are looking for a young 18-25 year old developer/creative who

Young CT Award

We are excited to announce that Kaho Cheung is joining the DX Lab team as the DX Lab Developer. Kaho Cheung is a full stack developer with a particular interest in data and interaction design. For the past 4 years, Kaho has been a Senior Digital Developer at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS) in Sydney. Most recently, Kaho helped deliver MAAS’s new collection website and public API. After studying industrial design, Kaho has moved from print, web design

DX Lab News

The DX Lab is excited to announce the DX Lab fellowship for the second time. This digital fellowship has been specifically set up to support the creative and innovative use of the Library&#8217;s collection data. It promotes innovation, partnerships, experimentation and creativity using the Library’s data via new interfaces and experiences. This is a unique opportunity for researchers in the digital humanities particularly within the Gallery, Library, Museum and Archive sector (GLAM). The fellowship is being offered at $30,000 to enable research and digital innovation. &#8216;The opportunity to offer the

DX Lab Fellowship #2

Muru View: Visualising Aboriginal place and meaning. NGARA YAR-RE GNA Hear, Say, See To celebrate NAIDOC week this year, with it&#8217;s theme of &#8216;The importance, resilience and richness of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages&#8217;, the DX Lab has partnered with the Library&#8217;s Indigenous Services team and creative studio Sandpit to produce our latest experiment Muru View. This work follows on from our previous experiment Weemala that uses Survey forms and correspondence received by the Royal Anthropological Society of Australasia regarding Aboriginal place

Muru View

Wynscreen is a new large-scale installation screen located at Wynyard Station near the York Street entrance. Transport NSW are committed it being used by artists and not for advertising. The screen is over 20 metres long and slightly curved at the edges, showing art, culture and technology in a visually rich way to around 30,000 train passengers every day . The DX Lab and Research and Discovery branch at the State Library of NSW have collaborated with Sarah Kenderdine and

Zooming Sydney

We are thrilled to announce that our next Digital Drop-in expert is Tim Sherratt. Tim is a historian and hacker who researches the possibilities and politics of digital cultural collections. Tim has worked across the cultural heritage sector and has been developing online resources relating to libraries, archives, museums and history since 1993. His creations include useful things like QueryPic, strange things like the Vintage Face Depot, and important things like The Real Face of White Australia. He’s currently Associate

Digital Drop-in: Tim Sherratt

What would Sydney have been like if Mr John Young&#8217;s 1877 proposed &#8216;City of Sydney and Suburban Railway Extension&#8216; had actually been built? Would Sydney-siders be better off with this version of the City Circle Line or the line that was eventually built serving thousands of commuters every day?  This map, in our collection, has been a source of interest to us in the DX Lab for quite some time and was an inspiration early on in the creative process for the making of our data visualisation Loom. &#8220;In

Young Sydney

DX Lab Fellows Diary #3 Elisa Lee and Adam Hinshaw. 20th April, 2017 &#8211; Launch The project has a new name, Unstacked. Why Unstacked? Simply because we are viewing items which are physically or digitally coming from “the stacks”, the underground space where the library holds much of its collection. It is an intriguing labyrinth of shelves, drawers, cupboards and boxes containing a multitude of treasures including books, newspapers, photos, maps, mini-portraits, stamp drawers, architectural drawings and more. It would be such

Unstacked Launch

We are thrilled to announce that Aaron Straup Cope is joining the DX Lab this week as our next Digital Drop-In. Aaron is currently Editor at Large and the creator of the Who&#8217;s On First project at Mapzen. Between 2012 and 2015 he was Head of Engineering at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, responsible for the architecture, implementation and general table-pounding of the museum&#8217;s digital infrastructure as well as the creation and delivery of The Pen. Before all of

Digital Drop-In: Aaron Straup Cope

&#8220;For most of the nineteenth century, panoramic photographers resorted to joining a series of images together and mounting them on linen backing. Some were very successful and Charles Bayliss’s famous 1875 panorama of Sydney, taken from the tower of Holtermann’s residence in North Sydney, was the pinnacle of large-scale vistas in Australia. Made from a series of twenty-three wet-plate negatives measuring 56 by 46 centimetres many of which were duplicated four or more times to obtain the best image -the

Pano-scope

Post by Paula Bray, DX Lab Leader, James Boyce, Creative Director Grumpy Sailor Creative and Mauricio Massaia Senior Developer Grumpy Sailor Creative. Today we are very excited  to launch the third and final phase of Loom, which we have called Index.  (The third icon at the top of the interface) Loom is the DX Lab&#8217;s first iterative experiment with data visualisation. The data it uses is from the Library&#8217;s collection and focuses on locations around the CBD of  Sydney. Each view

Loom: index

Humphry Repton’s eighteenth century pop up book comes to life! The DX Lab has been experimenting with open-source slider technology for our curator Sarah Morley who wanted to find a new way to experience the works from this collection item. The original item is a flip-book of gardens.  The technology solution that we found to work really well is JuxtaposeJS. This tool: ‘Helps storytellers compare two pieces of similar media, including photos, and GIFs. It’s ideal for highlighting then/now stories that explain

Repton flip book

We have been working on the next phase of Loom which will be live soon. Whilst we were on the tools pulling it together we thought it worthwhile to make small changes to improve the user experience. We have conducted some user testing and dug up a few pain points that we have addressed in this phase. This is what we have done: Users wanted an understanding of what to expect when they landed in the experience. So we have

Loom UX updates

To celebrate the joining of the span of the Sydney Harbour Bridge on 19th August 1930 we have made a time-lapse of this moment taken from the following item in our collection. A symphony in steel: 100 photographs of the Sydney Harbour Bridge arranged as a Flickascope. Flick the pages from Back to Front to See it grow&#8230; Posted by Margot Riley, Curator Research and Discovery. This flickascope (also known as a flip, flick or movie book) is a collection of pictures arranged in a specific

A Symphony in Steel

The Library is committed to providing the best possible access to our digitised images so we have decided to replace as many of the images in our Flickr Commons account with high-resolution files that we can. The Library is currently putting new systems in place to manage all of our collection catalogues including  a method for downloading high-resolution files but this will take a bit longer as we work through the user-experience requirements. The Library joined Flickr Commons in 2008 and currently have almost 3000

High-res images

1001 Postcards is an experimental WebGL  interface using over 1000 postcards from the Library&#8217;s Broadhurst Collection. This interface has been built for a desktop experience. William Henry Broadhurst was born at Maitland on 13th August, 1855; he died aged 72 on 29 July 1927. He moved to Ashfield, Sydney, and began employment as a surveyor&#8217;s assistant, working mainly on the south coast of NSW. He turned his interest in photography into a business, and from around 1900 began to publish postcards. Many of the

1001 Postcards

Post by Elisa Lee and Adam Hinshaw Prototype, Milestone Presentation and Technical Strategies We now have a prototype created from the web logs and the results are fascinating. It’s extremely easy to be distracted by the content people are accessing and hypothesise on their motivations for looking at it. This was a large part of the project&#8217;s intent so that’s a good thing. We’ve looked at 2 batches of data, both covering 3 consecutive days of catalogue views. Here are some highlights: Sarah

DX Lab Fellows Diary

Thanks to all the participants at our &#8216;Library of the Future: UX Rapid Prototyping Workshop&#8216; last Thursday night that we hosted in collaboration with IxDA Sydney. Below are the fantastic sketches that workshop participants made on the night in response to the two briefs that we set. The briefs were: The Library card of the future: Imagine a library so connected for users that they could experience a vast array of stories and content that they can enjoy anywhere and any

UX Sketches

The DX Lab in collaboration with IxDA Sydney is hosting a UX workshop titled &#8216;The Library of the Future:UX Rapid Prototyping Workshop.&#8217; This event will be a fun, fast-paced and future thinking UX prototyping session. The challenge: designing digital interfaces for the Library of the Future. The workshop will include two design challenges that the DXLab is currently exploring. Each session will kick off with a detailed brief outlining your projects design limitations and resources. Then, working collaboratively with other workshop attendees you

UX Workshop

Post by Chris McDowall, Creative Technologist A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to spend a week working as a DX Lab Digital Drop-in. Ahead of my visit, Paula shared a pair of spreadsheets, which would serve as the basis of my experiment: A list of manuscript pages from Box 4 of MLMSS 7603: Survey forms and correspondence received by the Royal Anthropological Society of Australasia regarding Aboriginal place names, 1899-1903. A list of transcribed and geo-located placenames from

Building Weemala

Post by Elisa Lee and Adam Hinshaw DX Lab Fellows Mon 8 February &#8211; Project Kick-off and Curatorial and Librarian Workshop with Digital Experience Division, Library &amp; Information Services, Exhibitions, Research &amp; Discovery, Information &amp; Access and Digitisation &amp; Imaging. Today we officially started the project and were welcomed by the Digital Experience Division, the State Librarian and Chief Executive and the Mitchell Librarian and Director, Education &amp; Scholarship. This was followed by a presentation and “curatorial and librarian” workshop.

This fellowship has now closed. Congratulations to Fellowship recipient Geoff Hinchcliffe. Geoff is Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University&#8217;s School of Art where he is developing a new Design program. His areas of research are web design and data visualisation, and he has worked with other cultural institutions. Compelling Collections: improving the utility and aesthetics ‘This project responds to the call to create a “more engaging and purposeful experience” of the SLNSW’s rich K-12 content such as the Visionaries collection.

Digital Fellowship

International Open Data Day was held recently and in celebration of this we have decided to get some different data sets together for you to be inspired by and to use.  #50libcats came about when Erika Taylor from the Tweed Regional Museum spent two weeks in the DX Lab as part of the Digital Drop-In program. Erika set up a spreadsheet and collected 50 cats from the Library&#8217;s collection. Inspired by Erika’s #50libcats &#8211; curators, librarians, managers and researchers from

#50libcats

This week we welcome Creative Technologist Chris McDowall into the DX Lab as a guest Digital Drop-In. Chris is a geographer, data enthusiast and visualisation designer. He has worked as a cartographer, an environmental scientist, a development manager at a startup and, most recently, as Manager of DigitalNZ Systems &#8211; a digital initiative that gathers digital content from easier to find, share and use — at the National Library of New Zealand. Chris is currently splitting his time between working on

Digital Drop-In: Chris McDowall

Portico is the DX Lab&#8217;s latest experiment. This digital experience is an in-gallery touch screen interface with a large-scale projection featured in the exhibition Imagine a City: 200 Years of Public Architecture in NSW.  Our brief was to utilise the online interface that we had built for Mainstreet with new content supplied from the Government Architect&#8217;s Office and turn it into an onsite experience.  One of the DX Lab&#8217;s  design principles is to iterate and this is what we have done with Portico.  We wanted to

Portico

We are thrilled to announce that Elisa Lee and Adam Hinshaw are the winners of the first DX Lab Fellowship.  There was strong competition for this fellowship and we are delighted to have such innovative ideas presented to us by a range of different creative technologists.  The judging panel consisted of: Seb Chan Chief Experience Officer, ACMI Tom Uglow, Creative Director, Google Creative Lab Richard Neville, Mitchell Librarian and Director of Education and Scholarship SLNSW Paula Bray, DX Lab Leader, SLNSW

Fellowship winner #1

We are currently in the design process of the third phase/lens of our data visualisation project Loom. This phase has always been about exploring the rich amount of metadata that we have in all the databases that are associated with the locations around the Sydney CBD. Looseleaf is the visual entry into the data, Atlas is the bird’s eye location, map view of the data and our third phase is all about the data and possibly the most complicated to

Index Prototype

The DX Lab is thrilled to announce its first dedicated digital fellowship that has been specifically set up to support the creative and innovative use of the Library&#8217;s collection data.  The fellowship promotes innovation, partnerships, experimentation and the creative use of the Library’s data via new interfaces and experiences.  This is a unique opportunity for researchers in the digital humanities particularly within the Gallery, Library, Museum and Archive sector (GLAM). The fellowship is being offered at $30,000 to enable research and digital innovation. “This

DX Lab Fellowship #1

We have just published the second phase of Loom which we are calling &#8216;Atlas&#8217;. See the second icon on Loom. This is a heat map view of the same location data from the &#8216;looseleaf&#8217; phase but we have provided 10 more specific areas within the CBD location for exploring. These include: Circular Quay The Rocks Botanic Gardens Martin Place George Street Darling Harbour St Mary&#8217;s Cathedral Millers Point Woolloomooloo Bridge Street With this phase we are pulling in the data about what has been

Loom: Atlas view

Main Street is the result of a collaborative project between the DX Lab and the Tweed Regional Museum. It is the result of a two-week ‘digital drop-in’  run by the Lab. This drop-in program supports creative and innovative thinking and is open to collaborations with staff, researchers, students, artists and digital peers. Erika Taylor, Curator of the Tweed Regional Museum worked with the Lab developers for two weeks, to develop the concept and resulting first iteration of Main Street. The

Main Street

This is a guest post by Erika Taylor, Curator of Collections and Programs Tweed Regional Museum. It’s an incredible thing to watch an idea come to life, from your brain, to reality. After two weeks working in with the DX Lab we are excited to present Main Street. Main Street is the result of the DX Lab first ‘digital drop-in’ program and explores how the collection at the State Library of NSW can be used in conjunction with a NSW regional collection, to provide a beautiful digital

Two weeks in the Lab

What happens when you put a museum curator and two DX Lab web developers in a room in the State Library of NSW for two weeks? Well we are about to find out. My name is Erika Taylor, I am the Curator of Collections and Programs at the Tweed Regional Museum in Northern NSW. I’m passionate about regional museums participating in digital innovation in the cultural sector and I’m thrilled to be invited to be the first digital drop in

Digital Drop-in: Erika Taylor

We are now looking into the design and build of the second phase of Loom. We always intended to have three different ways to experience the same data and to be able to delve deeper into it via each view. The &#8216;Atlas&#8217; is what we are working on right now and here&#8217;s a sneak peek at how this is tracking. The Atlas view is a mapping view that you can rotate and see content elevations for what has been digitised and what is available

Sneak peek: map view

We recently launched the DX Lab at the Remix Summit in Sydney on the 3rd June.  Here are the slides from our presentation, we hope you enjoy them.

Slides from Remix

LOOM is the first experiment for the DX Lab.

Loom: API experiment

On the 30th April we held our first public engagement forum, Meet the Data Owners.

Meet the Data Owners

We are interested in what our visitors are searching for whilst using our collection.

Real time search

Read about the design principles that the DX Lab is currently working with.

Design principles

Welcome to the DX Lab. This is a place where experimentation and research happens.

Meet the lab

The DX Lab is fortunate to work with the results of an extensive digitisation program.

Blog

Read our posts