Aza Raskin has released Ubiquity, a Firefox browser plugin that adds a command line of sorts to Firefox and gives you very easy access to search from within your browser. I haven't completely absorbed it yet, but the effect is that you type "option-space amazon blueberries for sal" and you get almost instant results within the browser like this:
Now, the question is as always: how do you make it so that your local library is as easy and as few keystrokes away as a major online book vendor? I don't have the answer yet - writing Ubiquity commands involves Javascript, and I don't have a super simple tutorial just yet for this task - but it's a very reasonable ideal.
As I understand it, Ubiquity is javascript creating/getting JSON from other services?
How about a z39.50<->JSON gateway? You give that gateway a restful query and info about the library catalog, and it spits back nice XML, serialized PHP or JSON.
I know, it's not REST or anything =)
Posted by: alejandro garza | 28 August 2008 at 06:02 PM
I have an idea. How about we pour millions into R&D, hire a bunch of brilliant, highly motivated, well paid, usability people, and then give them 20% project time to work on their own ideas? Then we can start selling advertising in catalog search results. Oh heck, we can sell advertising on the whole library web presence! Of course, we'll need to spin off a commercial arm, but that's where the money is and we'll need that money to pay designers and developers! Screw you Cataloging and Circulation and ..., well, all of the departments that won't be funded anymore. All hail Academic Libraries, Inc!
Posted by: Me | 29 August 2008 at 07:03 AM
As Alejandro says, z39 -> json can work pretty well. I've used that to implement search suggestions in a firefox search plugin using php/yaz:
http://ex-libris.ca/?p=291
Posted by: Mike | 29 August 2008 at 11:09 AM