Superpatron - Friends of the Library, for the net

Text me the location of this book

From Casey Bisson: text this to me:

Adam Brin of Tricollege Libraries explained that the “text this to me” feature he built to send location information about items in the library catalog as text messages to a user’s cell phone is being used as many as 60 times a day. That was the news I needed to decide to offer the feature in PSU’s Scriblio implementation.

You can see this in action at the Plymouth State University library.

If I were a patron (oh right, I am a patron) I'd suggest adding an "email this to me" too with the same short text. My cell phone gets email for free, but I have to pay for SMS. Hmmm...I'll bet that it's within scope of a Greasemonkey script to do this....hmm...or a "twitter this to me".

He's using Clickatell which prices out at $0.06 or so per message sent.

Nice hack! Useful too.

Technorati Tags: library, mobile, sms, superpatron

Netsquared "mashup challenge" - library mashups too?

The NetSquared organization is sponsoring a mashup challenge

This year’s NetSquared Conference will bring together a unique mix of people from the public and private sectors to develop and release Mashups designed to provide deeper insight into the social issues affecting communities around the globe.

Those "people" are you — members of the NetSquared universe working on behalf of communities everywhere and the technical experts who care about these issues.

If we’re successful, we’ll learn something about cross-sector collaboration, meet new and interesting people, and build a unique gallery of Mashups that citizens, schools, and community-based groups everywhere can learn from, replicate, and build upon.

I'll challenge you to think of a mashup that incorporates data from your library system. Read the above link for details; there's $100k in funding for up to 20 projects. Submission due date is March 14, project winners announced March 24 2008.

Technorati Tags: mashup, netsquared

twitter at your library - what should or could it do?

Ryan Eby just invited me to join the Ann Arbor District Library twitter feed:

http://twitter.com/aadl

He promises event notifications and other newsworthy stuff.

Once upon a time I built a "superpatronbot" that searched the AADL catalog via a Jabber bot - quite reasonably you could build one of these upon Twitter's direct message listings. Useful? Perhaps, especially if I could link a Twitter account to my library card and then be able to twitter

d aadl reserve anatomy of a murder dvd

and have it do a hold on it for me (or return some disambiguator if there were multiple choices).

(Reminder - Library Camp 2008 at the AADL, March 20 2008.)

Technorati Tags: aadl, twitter

Reported problems with AADL greasemonkey script

One of the users of the greasemonkey script I wrote last year that puts AADL holdings information into Amazon reported that it stopped working under Leopard.

Haven't debugged it yet, but I want to acknowledge the problem openly (in the hopes of course that someone else will fix it).

Can we fix it?
Yes we can!
-- Bob the Builder

New knitting books at the Ann Arbor District Library!

In the "wall of books" tradition, here's the current list of AADL knitting books, with covers of the last 100 acquired going back about a year. Warning! This page may load slowly.

As always, covers generate ideas for books to check out - in this case I put on hold Julie Jersild Roth's Knitting Nell

Everywhere Nell goes, she works on her knitting, quietly observing life around her, until one day she enters one of her creations in the county fair, and receives rewards beyond her dreams.

The very tiny shell script that generates this turns RSS records into links to AADL books with images stored on the Syndetics site; it would be a small matter of programming to also sync this up with Amazon images or your favorite online bookstore.

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.

Jon Udell's Library Lookup has moved

If your bookmark for Jon Udell's Library Lookup doesn't work, here's why - it's moved:

I’ve been continuing to receive requests to update the LibraryLookup bookmarklet generator which, since it’s hosted at InfoWorld, I can no longer maintain. So took a snapshot at jonudell.net/LibraryLookupGenerator.html, and I’ll make updates there. Today, thanks to Betsy Ptak, I added support for a newer version of PowerPac.

While I was at it, I resolved a longstanding annoyance. On Firefox, I was never able to figure out how to ensure that the lookup window would open in front of the current window. Turns out that Michael Moncur found a workaround over two years ago. Apparently it’s still needed in the current version of Firefox, so I rolled it into the generator.

Library Lookup gives you a one-click way to determine if your library has a copy of a book that you see on your screen - very handy!

Technorati Tags: library-lookup, books, library

arXiv API - via Peter Suber's Open Access News

Bill Tozier suggested that I look up Peter Suber from Open Access News - here's a recent article from that blog about a new programmable interface to the arXiv archive of physics and math preprints:

The goal of the API is to allow application developers access to all of the arXiv data, search and linking facilities with an easy-to-use programmatic interface. This page provides links to developer documentation, and gives instructions for how to join the mailing list and contact other developers and maintainers.

For more information about the arXiv API, please see our arxiv-api group, join the mailing list, look at the API FAQ, or join a discussion in #arxiv on irc.freenode.net....

The blog (more news than comment) has this intro:

Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature on the internet. Making it available free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Removing the barriers to serious research.

A challenge: build a Firefox search box for your online book finding system

Two years ago Matt Hampel built a Firefox search box plugin for the Ann Arbor District Library catalog. I use it all the time, and since then I've also added a similar search interface the Michigan-wide MeLCAT catalog.

My expectation is that it could be very easy to build one of these things for every single book finding system out there, even if it's not currently easy. The search box interface in Firefox is simple enough (a very short standardized script to install), and therefore a generator that builds these scripts based on some prior knowledge and a few simple parameters should be easy to do.

In the spirit of Jon Udell's Library Lookup project, I'd like to build a system for building these things for yourself.

Some research brings up this:

Lifehacker: Make your own Firefox site search plug-in:

This easy tip just streamlines this process: all you need to do is navigate to the Firefox plugins directory, save a simple text file, and then restart Firefox. Your plugin will show up in your Firefox drop-down engines - and you can do it for any site you search on a regular basis.

That documents a process for Firefox 1.1. The 2.0 process changed, so it's harder. But the comments unearthed this plugin:

Firefox Add-ons: Add to search bar

Make any pages' search functionality available in the Search Bar (or "search box")...

Just make a right click in a search field and choose "Add to Search Bar..."

NOW: Screencast available! If you don't know what to do after installing the extension, have a look at here: http://maltekraus.de/Firefox/search-tools/addtosearchbar-screencast.html

So I installed this and started trying it out. Results:

Remember the Milk: fails to search the right thing.
Google Custom Search Engine (for the Vacuum blog): awesome
Arborwiki: awesome

encouraged by that, I continued on to do the one that prompted me for this: Cindi Trainor, who asked me what I could do for her Voyager catalog at Eastern Kentucky University. The naive "keyword" search failed me (I'm not used to typing in booleans), but the "keyword relevance" search worked just fine. Some screen shots:

After installing the search engine, here's my new search bar:

and after searching, here's the result I get:

looks like a winner!

The search bar plugin is not hard to install - just add it in and restart Firefox. I suspect that once you generate one of these that you could redistribute it to people who didn't have this extension set up, but that detail can stay til the next go -around.

Technorati Tags: eastern-kentucky-university, firefox, firefox-search-bar, plugin, search

Jon Udell on Remixing the Library (GRL2020)

Jon Udell did a talk on remixing the library at the Global Research Library summit.

Abstract: In an online world of small pieces loosely joined, librarians are among the most well qualified and highly motivated joiners of those pieces. Library patrons, meanwhile, are in transition. Once mainly consumers of information, they are now, on the two-way web, becoming producers too. Can libraries function not only as centers of consumption, but also as centers of production?

mentioned in it: Library Lookup, Dune's "guild navigators", "folding space", xISBN, books on an Amazon wishlist available at your library, PatREST, superpatrons, superlibrarians, community photo aggregation, community calendar aggregation, libraries vs. newspapers as local information sources, community crime data, geocoding, Many Eyes, libraries as physical space, libraries in the mall, libraries as centers of production.

(sounded like an awesome talk - much to think about - much to do)

Technorati Tags: udell, judell, grl2020, library, arborparents