Technically Random

I started playing around with the Google Dynamic Feed Control and Yahoo Pipes to see what it would look like to bring together all the RSS and blog feeds in the Libraries.  I put up a couple of test pages:
http://www.lib.washington.edu/business/test/rss.html
and
http://www.lib.washington.edu/business/test/rss2.html

The first example is just using the Google Dynamic Feed Control and the second is using Yahoo Pipes to aggregate the feeds into a single feed and Google Dynamic Feed Control to display the feed on the page.  I like the simplicity of the second view, but (as was pointed out to me) you lose the context of the feed source that you get in the first view.

I only include the half dozen-ish blogs and feeds that I could find.  If you know of any other UW Libraries feeds, let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

And, to give credit where credit is due, Jake was playing with both of these tools long before I was.  He has a test page using the Google Dynamic Feed Control at:
http://www.lib.washington.edu/rss/intlstudies/newspage/newstest.html
and all of the new books lists that he does for International Studies is using Yahoo Pipes.

Corey

Library 2.0: an academic’s perspective blog has information about Zotero Commons, a new Zotero collaboration among scholars. (It will rely on the new Zotero 2.0 Server technology when that appears). Zotero Commons is a collaboration between George Mason University and the Internet Archive.

“Its purpose is to create an archive of scholarly resources, contributed by working scholars, in the public domain. The archive will offer a free optical scanning service to make the documents searchable. .. “

An amazing, significant project of course, but what raised some eyebrows was this statement from an Inside Higher Ed article:

“Now, an effort at George Mason University seeks to bypass libraries entirely and delve into scholars’ file cabinets instead …”.

Which, although journalist-speak, raises all sorts of interesting questions, issues and lively discussion in academic libraryland . Anyway, check out the blog post and discussion.

The blog btw is a favorite – deep, thoughtful posts . On your RSS radar, or you can keep up with a live aggregation here (click on Blogs: Libraries and scroll down the page) .

I use Zotero, admire it,  and cuss it regularly because it doesn’t do what I want (yet). But the potential is absolutely stunning. If you can imagine a world (perhaps in the not-too-distant future) where our metadata is free from the OPAC and exists as a plug-in module or a web service, then add scholar-produced tags/links and full text access – you get a glimpse of where this could go.

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.

E-journal  RSS TOC (Tables of Contents) feeds are increasingly important for researchers in all academic fields. Scholars can track current and upcoming publications sometimes even before the articles actually appear.

News from ticTOCS:  http://tictocsnews.wordpress.com/  is a discovery tool for new e-journal TOC feeds. The site is affiliated with the  ticTOC Project which aims eventually to be a central clearinghouse of information about  scholarly TOC’s.  The blog (of course) has its own RSS feed, and a growing Blogroll with direct links to related publishers and sites.