Superpatron

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

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

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

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

LibraryThing's new Common Knowledge

From their newsletter:

We're excited to release a new and addictive feature, "Common Knowledge." Basically, we've added a slew of fields to every author and book page, so anyone can add book awards, character names, biographical details on authors, book descriptions and more. It works like a wiki -- any member can add information, and any member can edit or revert the changes.

See the blog post about it.

I can vouch for the addictive part of it. The appropriate game is to identify a place where authors live (e.g Ann Arbor, MI) or a university they have gone to (e.g University of Michigan) and work your way through the world of LibraryThing filling in the gaps in their data. The easiest browser to see where the new data is coming in is the gender list; see new male, female authors.

Visibly missing is only an RSS feed for each of the new common knowledge pages (should be easy enough to do?). The authority control problem is making sure that all of the various variant ways to enter city, state, country get properly sorted together; is it "Ann Arbor, MI" or "Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America"? Autocompletion helps here.

Technorati Tags: librarything, authors, metadata, crowdsourcing

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

Bookins - http://www.bookins.com - book trading

Bookins is a book trading site.  Here's what they have to say about themselves:

Bookins is the only book-trading service that helps you swap books with no fuss. There is no standing in line at the post office, and no need to follow-up with each member you exchange with. We provide the postage, track all shipments, and make sure you get back books of equal value. We even provide replacements at our expense for lost/damaged books.

They have been up and running on LibraryThing as a partner for about a year (since last year's Talk Like a Pirate Day):

Bookins bills itself as "easy, automated and fair." Its unique features include an algorithm for assigning points to books, so a new hardcover of Freakonomics is worth more than an old paperback Tom Clancy novel, and a $3.99 flat shipping rate, with package tracking right on the site. Again, it's nice to see that the dozen or so swap sites aren't just copying each other, but trying out different ideas.

Their key innovation is using self-printed accurate prepaid USPS postage for book returns, saving you a trip to the post office to weight and ship things.  From a USPS publication:

Putting good books in the hands of eager readers presented a shipping challenge for entrepreneur Mitchell Silverman. But with the help of USPS Web Tools, his company, Bookins, is able to do just that. USPS Web Tools allow customers to print out their shipping labels while remaining on the Bookins site. It’s a service Silverman depends on, and he’s never been disappointed.

There's a patent application on Method and apparatus for bartering items #20060026077

According to a computer-implemented approach for bartering items between customers, customers engage in the exchange of items wherein the system determines the parameters of the exchange. According to the approach, customers provide item selection criteria to a provider indicating items the customers desire to receive and items the customers are willing to send. In response to the item delivery criteria being satisfied, the provider prompts a customer to send an item to another customer, and the customer prompted by the provider sends the item to the other customer over a delivery channel. Provider determines the point value of the item sent and gives points to the customer sending the item and charges points from the customer receiving the item.

Technorati Tags: bookins, librarything, mitchell-s-silverman, barter, usps, usps-web-tools, uspto, patents, books, book-trading

Eli Neiburger presentation on implementing Drupal at AADL - 9/24

from the Ann Arbor Drupal Users Group

Don't miss this meeting!!!

I'm happy to announce that Eli Neiburger of the Ann Arbor District Library is going to present at this coming Ann Arbor Drupal Users group meeting this Monday night 24Sep07 @ 7pm.

This will be a rare chance to look under the hood of a regionally high profile Drupal site.

We will meet at Ann Arbor Spark our new home.

The site has tons of features, users, images and so much more. I don't presume to know anything about what's going on behind the scenes. But from a users perspective it is handling tons of logistics in the form of inventory, users, transactions, reservations, reviews, events, interoperability with other web services, ....

I have wanted to see this presentation since I learned about this site. I can't wait and hope to see you there.
Bring a friend!

Technorati Tags: aadl, ann-arbor-district-library, drupal, eli-neiburger, ann-arbor-drupal-users-group, ann-arbor-spark, ann-arbor-usa