Superpatron - Friends of the Library, for the net

Things I want to write more about here - categories A-G

Every so often I run into corners of the world that I want to explore. Here's some list of the things I'd like to write more about, even if I don't have a full blog-length posting for any of them written right now. I'm keying off the categories I've set up.

This is part 1: Amazon through Google Book Search.

Sorry no links yet....will hyperlink as I have time to edit, but I thought I'd get this out into the world.

Amazon - about the book cover and album cover art database they have; how to set up an affiliate bookstore that actually works; on using Amazon to do wish lists that are then fulfilled through your library (via Jon Udell); on using Amazon as a book finding system and then using Book Burro or similar to connect back to your library; much more I'm sure.

Ann Arbor - plans for a new library downtown; reviews of all of the branches; reviews of other Washtenaw County libraries; special libraries in town like the Ford Presidential Library

Archives - an interview with the folks who run the Labadie Collection; an interview with the Prelingers; an interview with Brewster Kahle; some discussion of the peculiar nature of archives in the digital age

Archival Television - Jeff Ubois blog of the same name; the loss of the video record; clearing and securing rights; bootlegs on Youtube; museums of the broadcast industry

Beyond big vendors - this was the title of a talk I gave; an exploration of consolidation in the integrated library systems space, and some understanding of new alternatives

Book Burro - at least an annual post on what it is (repetition is the soul of the net); a screencast showing how I use it; documentation for online book finding system developers to get them to have Book Burro pop up on their book screens; a discussion of how tools like this can be funded by affiliate revenues

Book covers - as finding aids; variations between editions; in online book finding and book inventory systems; search by contents of the cover, not contents of the book

Book trading - more reviews of any book trading systems I find; some stories about book swap clubs that meet in person; children's birthday parties where everyone brings a book and everyone gets a book

Bookins - how they advertise new inventory on Twitter; comparison with other book swap sites; integration with LibraryThing

Books - more book reviews, lots of book reviews would be welcomed; the book publishing industry as a whole; old books; smelly books; pretty much anything is fair game.

Books sorted by color - more discussion of cover art, illustrations, other metadata about the book captured in the cover art but not indexed by typical book finding systems; the book illustration business; how covers are designed; history of binding systems; algorithms to determine which color a book is; art and photographic illustrations of installations where books have been sorted by color

Bookshelves - compact shelving, buying shelves for personal libraries, reviews of bookcases, shelving for libraries, innovations in book shelving, reviews of books about bookshelves, how to build your own, built in shelving, what to do when yours fill up

Code - more code! software that does interesting things with book and library data; mashups, data extraction, search algorithms, recommender systems, page layout, interactive design, home grown alternative views of the library

Collection development - impact of patrons on collections; controversial materials and how they are added to the collection and perhaps subtracted from the collection; metrics used for weeding and deaccessions; building your personal library from another library's discards; libraries as endangering printed materials

Electronic collections - library originated book and non-book collections; hardware, software, and systems for managing and cataloging same; preservation of digital relics; copyright, fair use and international implications of same; the proper provenance of enthusiast collectors

Events and exhibits - individual events and exhibits, and also ways by which libraries can improve their ability to bring people through the door by hosting book-themed events. Compare libraries to bookstores and see how they stack up; facilities building and planning with events in mind.

Film - libraries for film; collecting video and film; archival television (via Jeff Ubois); rights, copyrights, and the like; stock footage libraries; impact of digital distribution on the circulation patterns in public libraries that have big DVD collections

Friends Bookshop - relationships between Friends groups and libraries; examples of particularly fun bookshops; self service bookshops; using friends book inventory to do outreach; purposes of friends bookshops - to entertain people who want to run a bookstore, or to raise money, or both

Friends of the library - about national and local organizations; demographics of friends groups; "Friends of the Library, for the net"; library advocacy; when friends groups turn into haters groups

Games - games in the library; word games; something more about Eli@AADL; Wii at the library. Games in the kids room - ice cream truck. Learning from games.

Google Book Search - contracts, restrictions on use of data, inaccuracies within, quality of scanning, quality of metadata, shout out to Ben Bunnell, aftermarket greasemonkey hacks to fix issues with, comparison with Microsoft et al, comparison with Open Library, Distributed Proofreaders

Google Scholar - library use and access to, Andrew Odlyzko on open publishing, relative frequency of citation of non-internet publications, Math 40 yr history of increased collaboration via Patrick Ion, quality of data, quality of metadata, use by scholars as replacement for vita

What color (or hue) is that book?

Dave Pattern and I had an exchange (via Facebook and his blog) about how to efficiently extract the color of a book from Amazon's cover images database. He turned it into a web service, and I turned that web service into a shell script for your scripting needs. Both very raw and beta (alpha really). See

http://library.hud.ac.uk/balti/bookcolor.pl?isbn=0545010225 - XML interface
http://library.hud.ac.uk/balti/bookcolor2.pl?isbn=0545010225 - web interface
http://www.superpatron.com/wall-of-books/book-color.sh - shell script

I have not turned that (yet) into "book search results sorted by color", which I think is as easy as pulling down an RSS feed of search results, pulling a color for each, and doing the sort. Alas RGB color values prove hard to sort into a rainbow as is, so you might want to use

http://library.hud.ac.uk/balti/bookcolor.pl?isbn=0545010225&colorspace=HSL

the colorspace=HSL parameter to return (hue, saturation, luminance) instead of (red, green, blue). My color theory ends here, anyone know how to build a rainbow?

Technorati Tags: color, colour, huddersfield, amazon, web-services

Library Lookup for MeLCaT - Michigan interlibrary loan network

MeLCat is the Michigan statewide library interlibrary loan network. From the ASDAL newsletter

At the very first MeLCat user's meeting there was a comparison made between the costs of traditional inter-library loan and this new delivery system. Traditional ILL costs between $17 and $30 dollars per item, with deliver time of up to two weeks; while MeLCat costs are between $1 to $5 dollars per item, with delivery times of one to three days. Pretty fantastic!

Indeed, with borrowing rights now at research and public libraries across the state, there's hardly ever a book I might want to look at that isn't somewhere a few days away. The trick then is finding it before you give up on your search, and for that I turned to Jon Udell's Library Lookup project. A few tweaks to my older Ann Arbor District Library lookup script created a new MeLCaT Amazon Linky (Greasemonkey needed) which embeds search results in your Amazon pages.

Thanks to superpatron Jon Udell for the original insight that led to this, and to Pittsburgh area blogger "Inner Bitch" who was the proximate cause for me revisiting this in her "Taking a can opener to Amazon" post.

The next natural step is to revisit the Google Books library lookup script I did for Google and Ann Arbor and mash that around again so it hits the whole state - I hope to have that ready in time for when Google's Ben Bunnell visits the Ann Arbor District Library on November 30 2006 (see upcoming.org for details).

UPDATE: Google Books MeLCaT library lookup just updated.

Technorati Tags: amazon, google, judell, librarylookup