Tag: library

Finally, “LibraryLookup” bookmarklet for my local library

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/stories/
2002/12/11/librarylookup.html

Hard to believe, but it’s almost 3 years since one of the first really cool Web2.doh! mashups, Jon Udell’s ‘LibraryLookup’ boomarklet, first hit the streets. You remember this one (maybe you use it everyday?), it allowed you to query your local library’s catalogue with one click from any book-related page that had an ISBN number in the URL (like an Amazon listing, for instance).

I remember being very excited when I first found this, only to become frustrated that my local library, the GVPL, was using a library catalogue at the time that couldn’t be queried via ISBN, so the bookmarklet wouldn’t work.

So I forgot about it, until the serendipity of the blogosphere brought me back to Udell’s site today, and I thought maybe I would try it out again. And it worked!

This is very cool – I actually keep my ‘things I’d like to read‘ list basically in Amazon’s wishlist and this provides a nice tie-in for me to easily folow up now into my library catalogue to see if the book’s there. Not groundshaking, maybe, but I know this will actually increase the number of these books I end up reading and not just wishing for. – SWL

RLG-NARA Audit Checklist for Certifying Digital Repositories

http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=20769

Via David Mattison comes this interesting link to an effort to establish a set of guidelines for determining whether a digital repository can be certified as a trusted location for digital collections. Note that ‘repositories’ are being used here very much in a library-centric way, and that these may or may not apply to the same degree to learning object repositories, but some interesting things to learn from and expectations to live up to (you mean you don’t want the whole collection to magically disappear in 3 years time? Damn, wish someone had told me 😉 – SWL

P.S. Don’t get to thinking I’m blogging again – am still underwater with work and on a self-imposed blogging hunger strike (not sure what I’m protesting yet, I’ll think of something!) but these last two got me to post somehow.

Integrating Library Reserves and Course Management Systems: Aleph, RSS, and Sakai

http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/
666?ID=MWR0566

Hey, I’m as excited about the potential of service-oriented architectures and the ‘loosely coupled’ appproach as the next guy, but on a regular basis I find myself lamenting the seeming lack of real world working examples one can currently point to.

Yet every time I feel this way, along comes another presentation like this one, in this case describing the use of RSS to display library resource holdings within the Sakai CMTools application, that help me believe the grand vision of diversity and choice with stability and integration may actually come true. So don’t dispair; ‘network economy’ effects to the contrary, slowly cracks are forming in the vendor lockdown and silos we all lament … really … I think. – SWL

Center for the Study of Digital Libraries

http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/

I know the “professionals” who work on search, taxonomies, the semantic web and the like will all know about this resource, but many who are interested in topics like “folksonomies” could do worse than spend a bit of time reading some of the papers published in the CSDL’s online library of publications. If you are interested in these kinds of topics, be prepared to set aside many hours for what you find, (and also to turn on your ‘academic publications’ bullsh*t filter – god how I detest some of the conventions of academic writing, much as I understand why they exist). – SWL

New Questia CMS built on top of Library System

http://makeashorterlink.com/?N21E1465A

I know nothing about this system, but it caught my eye as significant as it is the first CMS that I know of coming from a library catalog vendor and being built on top of collection of library materials.

For those who lament the seemingly dominant instructivist bent of current CMS this seems hardly a good thing, likewise the ‘small pieces’ crowd. But as my colleague Bruce Landon keeps reminding me in our discussions about learning object repositories, at the end of the day, libraries are the ones with the budget dollars and seemingly more entrenched institutional mandates and may well end up being where many of these systems get located. – SWL

Metis Digital Library Workflow System

http://www-serl.cs.colorado.edu/metis/index.html

One of a number of interesting services and tools funded by the NSDL, Metis is “a workflow system designed to support the workflow needs of digital libraries.” This Java-based application seems ot only work against its own internal store of users, but different events and roles can be configured to perform actions such as file compression, mvoing files, creating timers and new users and email notification. There is an API published, and you seem to get the source code in the download though no indication I could find of the license status. – SWL

D-Lib Article – A Web Service Interface for Creating Concept Browsing Interfaces

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november04/sumner/11sumner.html

Some of you may have run across the VUE concept mapping application before. One of its promises is that it will allow you to create concept map interfaces to Fedora-based repositories.

This recent D-Lib article describes a similar innovation, but in this case it is the introduction of a web service-based interface called “Concept Space Interchange Protocol” to support the deployment of concept browsing interfaces to digital libraries. As the paper concludes “The merit of [the] approach lies in its innovative use of web services technology to provide an educationally relevant visualization service across distributed library sites, as opposed to creating a visualization interface for a single library.”

What’s that sound you hear? Listen carefully, it’s the sound of the train leaving the station, and while the library community all quietly climbed aboard, the ed tech community was still debating the need for a train. – SWL

Library ‘Robots’ and the joy of browsing

http://www.thetyee.ca/MediaCheck/current/
UBCBookBotKillJoy.htm

The University of British Columbia’s main library is implementing a system in which books are shelved in stacks accessible only to computer controlled robotic cranes. Users will call up books from computer terminals and they will be fetched for them.

Makes a lot of sense, especially as the volume of works explodes and the physical space can’t expand to keep up. This article, though, in part laments this innovation, noting it will likely cause the “lost pleasure of [the] ‘unexpectedÂ’,” that title beside the one you were searching for that actually ends up being the treasure you needed but hadn’t sought. (read more…)
Continue reading “Library ‘Robots’ and the joy of browsing”

Article on ‘Intro to the Search/Retrieve URL Service (SRU)’

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/morgan/

Related to the last post, this article from the latest issue of Ariadne gives a good introduction to the Search/Retrieve URL Service, a protocol designed to “define a standard form for Internet search queries as well as the structure of the responses.”
Even if the specific topic isn’t greatly of interest to you, the article may be useful in having one of the most stragithforward explanations of the difference between SOAP and REST-based web services, and why, contrary to all the hype, there is still some value in SOAP-based services. – SWL

RedLightGreen – Search 130 Million Library Titles and automatically create citations

http://www.redlightgreen.com/

Via David Mattison came news from the library world of this service aimed at undergraduates and the librarians that support them. RedLightGreen is a service from the Research Libraries Group (get it?) that allows users to search over 130 million library catalogue entries. The user can then automatically create citations in either MLA, APA, Chicago or Turabian styles, and with one click also check their local library for title availability. The service is free to anyone; if you are like me and only have to do academic citations irregularly, this is invaluable. – SWL