Technically Random

With Google’s announced release of an API for Google Books, it was only a matter of time before this functionality was integrated into WorldCat Local. The Google Books lookup was released as part of this month’s regular WCL maintenance. It appears that the ISBN is used as the lookup, so materials lacking an ISBN won’t include the preview button. So, no, it’s not perfect, but it is another big step in the right direction.

Here’s what it looks like for “The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy“.

This is a great feature and something that our users have requested and will definitely appreciate.

The DLF ILS and Discovery Systems group is proposing

standard interfaces for integrating the data and services of the Integrated Library System (ILS) with new applications supporting user discovery. Such standard interfaces will allow libraries to deploy new discovery services to meet ever-growing user expectations in the Web 2.0 era, take full advantage of advanced ILS data management and services, and encourage a strong, innovative community and marketplace in next-generation library management and discovery applications.

This set of standards (nicknamed the “Berkeley Accord”) would support:

• Harvesting of data records for library collections, both in full and incrementally;
• Querying for real-time availability of an item;
• Stable linking to any item in an OPAC.

A number of ILS vendors have already signed on.  Our own, beloved, Innovative Interfaces being the exception.  See the full announcement on Peter Brantley’s blog here.

Ken Varnum posted a directory libraries that have experimental “labs” of beta services and tools on his blog, RSS4Lib awhile back:

http://www.rss4lib.com/2007/10/directory_of_experimental_libr.html

These sites are a great source of inspiration & ideas for homegrown mashups and other library apps. Especially cool are the Undergraduate Virtual Library at University of Minnesota Libraries and NYPL’s enabling use of their digital images in a collaborative online video platform.

Take a look!

The Random Technology Un-Committee had our first meeting last week.

We talked a little about our preferred method of communicating with each other and to the rest of the Libraries and the result of that is this co-authored blog.

Jake talked a little about the work he’s done creating new acquisitions lists for folks in International Studies (http://lib.washington.edu/rss/intlStudies/) and RSS feeds for the same lists (http://lib.washington.edu/rss/intlStudies/rss.html). He also demoed some of the work he is doing with Solr/Lucene to create an interface to some of the specialized discovery tools that he’s been working on.

That led into a short discussion of the Simile Exhibit project that lets you create small databases that require no coding or back end db support, just a data file and an html file for display. We started to brainstorm applications for a tool like this, but I think we may need to go trolling among our colleagues to see what’s out there.

At some point, Lauren came up with the idea of a Google Maps/Google Earth mashup that shows the location of public and academic libraries. This would especially be useful in helping chat reference patrons find a library in their area. Some possible sources for data that we thought about include the OCLC registry, the Directory of Washington State Libraries, or possibly ALA.

What else… there were some meanderings into ideas about development frameworks like django and ruby on rails and doing work on the Libraries development server.

On the whole, it seemed like a good kick-off for the group. Stay tuned for more.