Superpatron - Friends of the Library, for the net: Donations feed for library book shop?

20 February 2006

Donations feed for library book shop?

At lunch at mashup camp I spoke with a library superpatron in New York City who talked about bringing eight boxes of books to his local library (Amsterdam in the 80s) for the library friends booksale. He had a good idea I'd like to share.

I talked quickly about the new books feed and hot books feed in Ann Arbor (links later) and he came up with the idea that you might be able to run a simple system in the Friends bookshop that would scan in books as they came in and then send out a feed of some sort of the newly acquired titles. You wouldn't necessarily have to have a full book inventory system as long as you limited your ambition to giving people a quick snapshot of what's coming in the door.

I think this might be as simple as a handheld scanner, a book lookup API, and posting to a blog or other feed. If you're lucky you'll get cover photos.

Technorati Tags: bookshop, friendsofthelibrary, rss, feed

Posted on 20 February 2006 in Public libraries | Permalink

Comments

Neat idea - as long as Friends store staff are willing to deal with the inevitable demand for specific items. :) Perhaps a LibraryThing account would work. Enter the ISBN of incoming books and it'll pull in a record for you. You could delete records after a certain amount of time to keep things fresh. Each LT account has RSS feeds for recent additions.

Posted by: nichole | 20 February 2006 at 05:25 PM

I was going to suggest LibraryThing as well. As you know, you'd avoid the need for the scanner, it'll do the lookup from LoC, Amazon or wherever else, and you'll get cover images and good metadata (plus the option to add your own).

Posted by: Simon Chamberlain | 21 February 2006 at 02:18 AM

hi ed, let's give this a try at the next friends sale, if they don't mind the attempt. i'll bring a copy of delicious monster and an isight, and we can have at it. dm exports a text file, easily converted to csv, easily converted through python to whatever format would make a good feed. an example of one line of data, prefaced by the field names:

medium, associatedURL, boxHeightInInches, boxLengthInInches, boxWeightInPounds, boxWidthInInches, scannednumber, upc, asin, country, title, fullTitle, series, numberInSeries, edition, aspect, mediacount, genre, price, currentValue, language, netrating, description, owner, publisher, published, rare, purchaseDate, rating, used, signed, hasExperienced, notes, location, paid, condition, notowned, author, illustrator, pages
book, , , , , , , 0785342616415, 0201616416, , Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, , , , , Paperback, , Computer Bks - Languages // Programming/ Computer Books: Languages/ Computer software/ Computers/ Development/ Programming - General/ Programming - Software Development/ Programming Languages - General/ Software Development/ eXtreme programming/ Computers // Programming // General, $28.95, $26.42, , 3.87, , , Addison-Wesley Pub Co, 05-10-1999, , 08-11-2004, , , , , , , , , , Kent Beck, ,

seems likely that this process could be done unofficially and prototyped at first, then automated into the library system pretty quickly and easily...

bob

Posted by: bob Kuehne | 23 February 2006 at 07:42 AM

seems likely that this process could be done unofficially and prototyped at first, then automated into the library system pretty quickly and easily...

bob

Posted by: bob kuehne | 23 February 2006 at 07:42 AM

What they're saying about Superpatron

So you've got Ed exploring the possibility space, and John working to enlarge that space, and together they've created a virtuous cycle of innovation. Now this is obviously an extreme example. You are not going to find a superpatron of Ed's caliber and a superlibrarian of John's caliber in every town. But I think the dynamic at work there can apply more broadly. And if it does, it will matter that these patrons and librarians are situated in a local context. (Jon Udell, Remixing the Library, GRL2020)
Der Supernutzer beschreibt 10 Möglichkeiten, der Bibliothek zu helfen....Den wichtigsten Punkt hat er vergessen, ihn aber selbst erfüllt. Sozusagen als Präambel könnte man also anführen:
“Übe konstruktive Kritik an der Bibliothek. Ohne Resonanz können die Leute da drin nicht wissen, was Du willst.” Infobib.de
How come only some books in the Google Book Search have “find in a library” links next to them? Diglet asks, and gets an answer, sort of a lame one if you ask me. update: Kevin mentioned in the comments that it would be great to see this for all books in Google Books. I went to bed thinking “Oh yeah, I should look into that….” and while I was sleeping, Superpatron, aka Ed Vielmetti solved the crime, er problem, and created a Greasemonkey script (a plug-in that you can run with Firefox) that does this for Ann Arbor and can be modified for any library. (Jessamyn West)
Curse you Superpatron! t's way past my bedtime, but the Ann Arbor Superpatron has been planting ideas in my head again… (Dave Pattern)
Superpatron is a blog run by a patron. The author posts entries about events and articles relevant to the library community, but does it with a patron point of view. (North Texas Regional Library System)
The blogosphere's resident "awesomest patron ever," Edward Vielmetti, appears in an article in School Library Journal about how he wrote a script tweaking (ahem, improving) Google Book Search. Vielmetti's blog, Superpatron, is one I read daily and highly recommend to anyone in libraries looking to get a very smart user's perspective. (Librarian In Black)
When I wrote him back, I called him the “AADL Super Patron,” which is very coincidental, since he has been planning to create a blog with almost the same name. Today, Superpatron is live and I’m sure it will quickly be filled with Ed’s terrific ideas about making libraries more responsive to patrons’ needs. So hurry up and subscribe already, ok? (Meredith Farkas)
The Superpatron (faster than a speeding reference librarian…) posts a presentation on the use of del.icio.us for research. Steven Cohen, Library Stuff
I've talked about Edward Vielmetti here before, but I never had the right name for him. Now I do. He's Superpatron! (Jenny Levine)
Last fall, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I gave a talk entitled Superpatrons and Superlibrarians. Joining me for this week’s podcast are the two guys who inspired that talk. The superpatron is Ed Vielmetti, an old Internet hand who likes to mash up the services proviced by the Ann Arbor District Library. That’s possible because superlibrarian John Blyberg, who works at the AADL, has reconfigured his library’s online catalog system, adding RSS feeds and a full-blown API he calls PatREST. (Jon Udell)
Little did I know that when I pointed to Ed Vielmetti’s blog, I was not only coining a phrase, but providing the name for Ed’s brilliant new blog. Ed is that (unfortunately still) rare creature that not only groks the net in fullness, but also has use for his public library. (Eli Neiburger)
Die Ann Arbor District Library hat einen Nutzer, der sie liebt. Und nicht nur das, er schreibt darüber. Oliver Obst

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20 February 2006

Donations feed for library book shop?

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