John Blyberg wrote a gadget for Google that lets you see new and hot books inside your custom home page. His blog entry has lots of details about it; here are a few screen shots.
This page shows what the section of your custom page looks like if you set it up to look for new knitting books. You can also configure it to look for new CDs or DVDs, to watch for hot books that have lots of holds at the library, and if you are so inclined you can put your current checkouts there as well.
Here's the corresponding configuration screen that goes with the knitting example. The "subject search" string has to be one of the subject terms used by the library, so pick your vocabulary carefully - books about fire fighting are listed under "fire extinction", and cookbooks are listed under "cookery". Knitting fortunately doesn't have any weird library-only word associated with it.
There are two libraries in the world that support this PatREST UI - Ann Arbor and the University of Huddersfield. My first round of testing didn't see that these work with Huddersfield, which seems to be missing a few necessary bits, but I didn't try all that hard. As I noted to John I'd love to see a "wall of books" style graphical version of this with book covers instead of text, & if I can decipher the Javascript he's using ...
This was an entry for Talis's Mashing Up the Library 2006 competition.
UPDATE 8/25/06: John tweaked the results and updated PatREST to make it easier to develop such services. I downloaded his code & made a few tiny changes in formatting (removing a few br/ tags) to come up with this "wall of books" style display.
Technorati Tags: aadl, annarbor, blyberg, google, innovation, MUTL06, patrest
If you're patient, I'll have a wall of books for you shortly :)
Posted by: John | 22 August 2006 at 11:55 AM