A really excellent example of the use of Flash technology in higher education is Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan developed at Bowdoin College. In addition to Flash the site makes use of a product called Zoomify.

This particular project was developed by Bowdoin’s educational technology unit in collaboration with Asian Studies professor Tom Conlan.

While the site is an impressive achievement and certainly a job well done, the underlying technology is not really that complicated. I point that out not to lessen the work done at Bowdoin in any way but to emphasize that this kind of project can be developed at many universities.

For a long time I’ve felt that libraries have an opportunity to develop similar projects in collaboration with faculty as part of a digitizing initiatives. Sometimes I feel that libraries have gotten rather stuck with the concept of databases and generic search and retrieval interfaces and haven’t fully explored all the possibilities.

While the scrolls in this specific project are a fairly small data set, what would be really interesting is to see a Flash-based interface designed for learning that retrieves its data through ActionScript calls to an XML-backed image database. Eventually, with the massive content that already has been digitized by libraries, I suspect that we will see more robust user level interfaces to manipulate and present that data.