Superpatron - Friends of the Library, for the net

Mashups: what happened?

The Krafty Librarian, a medical librarian in Ohio, asks what happened to library mashups

I recently read where the Journal of Biomedical Informatics recently had a call for papers for their special issue on Semantic Biomedical Mashups. I look forward to reading it when it comes out. However, this has me thinking. Where are all the library mashups? Talis had the Mashing up the Library competition last year, but I haven't seen any information on it for this year. The Talis Mashing of the Library competition boards are silent. The last post was made by David Rothman over 27 weeks ago. The Second OCLC Research Software Contest ran from July 1, 2006 through September 2006, however I haven't heard anything about it this year.

Here's some possible answers, but by no means all of them.

People building book finding systems started building in things into their tools rather than having to wait for users to mash things together. LibraryThing has scooped up a bunch of good ideas, and Book Burro continues to make almost all of my earlier fussing around with Greasemonkey unnecessary. When software developers listen to the feedback loop from their customers, it's not so necessary for those folks to write code to get their ideas in play.

Library systems are woeful in general for being easily reachable by ordinary mortals, in part because the book finding systems in them are designed primarily as hermetically sealed units with proprietary and inward-facing programming interfaces. So there aren't a lot of hooks to hook in on.

People are lazy, and when they've suitably scratched the mashup itch to solve the problems they see around them, they go off to the next thing (twitter, facebook, etc).

(hm, is there a super-easy twitter library mashup just waiting to happen? rss feed of something + twitterfeed? can't do every new book, but perhaps some subset...cookery? knitting? hmm)

Mostly, though, these sort of things are just happening (and much more so than in 2005 or 2006), and it's not notable that it happens to be a mashup - the notable part is that library directors are blogging, library patrons are writing book reviews, and the like. Perhaps the next steps are micro-steps, things like storytime hours being a one-click add to your calendar using a tool like IBM's Operator plugin for Firefox.

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

WorldCat review in Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools

The Cool Tools blog run by Kevin Kelly (of Whole Earth Catalog fame) has a review of WorldCat:

WorldCat is a publicly accessible online interface to the holdings of all types of libraries throughout the world: currently 57,000 libraries in 112 countries. Tell it what book you're looking for and your zip code or city, and it will pinpoint the nearest library that has the book. Same goes for magazines and journals, video and audio formats. The ability to locate an obscure book is invaluable; but it's also tremendously useful for anyone living in a region with more than one nearby library. California's Bay Area is blessed with an abundance of excellent public and academic library systems and a majority of them are represented in WorldCat, so in my case, it's a real time saver (I do a lot of sleuthing)

My own typical use of WorldCat is through Book Burro, which integrates with Open Worldcat:

By entering your zip code, Book Burro uses Open WorldCat’s web service to display local availability. I currently display the closest 5, although an option to display only libraries within a certain distance might be useful.

The Open Worldcat FAQ has more details.

What's on my bookshelf? Book trading system

What's On My Bookshelf is a book trading system. It says about itself:

Trade books using a simple point system
Classify books by tags (simple words that describe the book) rather than by traditional categories
Get notified when books you want are available for trade
Meet People with similar reading interests

Their tag cloud shows the most popular:

fiction (1840)
Romance (1707)
adult (296)
Mystery (288)
Children (280)
Historical Romance (223)
Thriller (159)
Children's (155)
nonfiction (148)
Science Fiction (134)
suspense (122)
fantasy (119)
kids (109)

and indeed the front page of the system is dominated by romances.

LibraryThing is integrated with WhatsOnMyBookshelf - their post from about a year ago reads

WhatsOnMyBookShelf is the creation of Daniel Ostermayer. WOMB was the first swap site to link to LibraryThing, and has been quick to implement integration. Even cooler, LibraryThing's use of swap-site wish lists prompted them to create a wish list feature of their own. See? Openness sparks innovation! Lastly, WOMB is the only swap site that goes beyond Amazon; you can search the Library of Congress instead!

They run Adbrite advertising on the book pages.

Users get a "community investment" score based on their activity in the system; this is a reputation system based on activity, so you can tell who is busy in the system. They also provide a feedback mechanism with rankings 0-5 based on the transaction so that you can find (and avoid) people who don't play the game well.

The book detail pages - e.g. this one - do not trigger Book Burro. They probably could if the Book Burro page parser was a little bit more aggressive. The LibraryThing integration is the fast path to Book Burro since you can go WOMB -> LibraryThing -> Amazon through an easy click path.

Book Burro wins 2d prize in OCLC mashup contest

Book Burro is a Firefox plugin that gives you a heads up when you are looking at a bookstore web site that the book you are looking at might be available cheaper at some other bookstore or for free at a local library. Recently Jesse added integration with OCLC's Open Worldcat so that you can an immediate heads-up as to availability.

Some reviews -
- Lorcan Dempsey - "it is indeed very nice"

- Liz Lawley - "I've already installed and fallen in love with"

OCLC had a contest for best Worldcat mashup; Book Burro won second place, behind Ross Singer's Umlaut OpenURL resolver.

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