Superpatron

mobile versions of library web sites

If your library catalog has a special version optimized for small computer screens as seen on mobile phones or specially for the iPhone, I'm interested in a pointer to it.

So far I've found these:

• American University Libraries


• Ball State University Library


• Boston University Medical Center Mobile Library


• Cal Poly Pomona University Library


• Hanover College, Duggan Library


• Harvard College Library


• University of Illinois Library


• LibraryThing


• New York University Libraries


• North Carolina State University Library


• University of Richmond Library


• St. John’s University, College of St. Benedict


• University of Virgina Library

but where there's this many there's bound to be more.

Megan Fox from Simmons has a very good list of PDA projects in libraries, from which a portion of this list is extracted.

update July 2008: userslib has a very nice collection of iPhone screen shots of mobile library sites, and there's a flickr set of mobile library iPhone screen shots that's very helpful.

Google Book Search bibliography from Charles Bailey

via read20-l:

Charles Bailey's Google Book Search Bibliography, Version 2 is now
available from Digital Scholarship.

http://www.digital-scholarship.org/gbsb/gbsb.htm

This bibliography presents selected English-language
articles and other works that are useful in understanding
Google Book Search. It primarily focuses on the evolution of
Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues
associated with it. Where possible, links are provided to
works that are freely available on the Internet, including
e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional
repositories. Note that e-prints and published articles may
not be identical.

--

scanners ahoy!

Chicagoland MG Club's tool lending library

I got a search hit for "tool lending library Chicago", and didn't know of one. Here's some results of a bit of research.

The Chicagoland MG Club is a membership organization for owners and restorers of MG cars. In addition to keeping a library of books and videos for their members, they manage a tool lending library with items like an air-acetylene torch, an engine hoist, an exhaust gas analyzer, and an MG-specific panel nut wrench.

Their guidelines for which tools they share (and which they don't) are instructive for anyone thinking about putting together a similar program:

The Club is also open to suggestions for additional tools to add to the Program. Keep in mind the standard philosophy, moderately expensive, to be used only occasionally by any one person for very short term, easy enough to be used by an average shade tree mechanic, portable, and requiring no special adaptations for power supply, exhaust connections, and so on.

Public relations in the Library - May 22, 2008, Canton MI

from MICHLIB-L:

The Michigan PR group will be having our second meeting on Thursday, May 22nd at 10:00am at the Canton Public Library. Anyone interested in marketing and promotions is welcome to join. Please RSVP to [email protected].

We will have an informal meeting style. Our agenda will be:
Introductions
Main discussion: Word of mouth marketing and ways to involve all staff in marketing.
Sharing success stories.
Setting next meeting.

Also don't forget about our wiki at http://michiganprgroup.wetpaint.com

Thanks,
Kelly

Kelly Ireland
Outreach Librarian
Southfield Public Library
26300 Evergreen Rd.
Southfield, MI 48076

(248) 796-4367
[email protected]
www.sfldlib.org

how to structure a URL for every page of every book

My colleague Bill Tozier has been doing a bunch of digitization work for Distributed Proofreaders, and as a part of that we had some discussions of how you might create some infrastructure to let you build hyperlinks to individual scans of individual pages in particular books.

The observed problem is that if you have a book, and have scanned in a page of that book, there is no easy way to predict what the URL would be to link to that page. Every system (Amazon, Google Books, etc) has its own way of doing things, and none of them have any sort of predictable REST style URL structure for deep linking.

I can imagine a system which would have page names like

http://everybookeverypage.com/isbn/0123456789/page/6.html
http://everybookeverypage.com/issn/01234567/volume/6/number/3/page/12.xml
http://everybookeverypage.com/librarything/work/3097331/book/5320426/page/12.json
http://everybookeverypage.com/aadl/record/1243670/page/12.jpg

e.g. with a URL parser that referenced a naming system, and within that system had a regular structure for naming the elements, and the system itself allowed either for unique copies (like librarything) or possibly non-unique copies (ISBNs). The name would also encapsulate the format which the item would be returned in, either as an image or as a data structure which would have pointers to (something).

This system wouldn't need to have any data in it - it could just resolve or look things up (as best it could).