Superpatron

using an rss feed as a user interface, the iPhone experience

thanks to Brian Kerr for showing me this; Ann Arbor specific; I don't have a screen shot to show you.

The iPhone's Safari web browser has a good RSS viewer inside it, which will display a feed nicely as a web page so that you can make your way through it.

As a result, the private RSS feed that the Ann Arbor District Library provides for holds and checkouts - or the public feeds for searches - show up nicely.  Brian notes that the books that are available now show up first on the list when you display it.

When I go to my favorite iPhone simulator it doesn't simulate the feed reader support, so I don't have a screen shot here.

one more reason to support RSS

Keeping up with journals with ticTOCs

One useful and interesting source of details about the world is tables of contents of academic journals.  Often you can get a sense for how a scholarly field behaves and how it's thinking by reading titles and abstracts, even if you can't actually get at the paper itself because of various obstacles to public access.

from the ticTOCs web site

The ticTOCs Journal Tables of Contents service makes it easy for academics, researchers, students and anyone else to keep up-to-date with newly published scholarly material by enabling them to find, display, store, combine and reuse thousands of journal tables of contents from multiple publishers. With ticTOCs, it only takes a tick or two to keep up to date.

The workflow for this system runs as follows: select some journals to follow, and build a customized feed from that journal set.  You can either read that feed from their site or export it to your favorite RSS reader (or your favorite application that reads feeds and processes them for you).  If you have a bunch of feeds saved up you can even export it as OPML which is a portable data format.

Access to any of the articles is still subject to the usual byzantine academic and scholarly publication rules, e.g. some will be open access, some will be weirdly licensed, and some will be pay per page.  I haven't used it enough to know if there's any kind of intelligent proxy based server integration for those who are off site.

This is incidentally how I found the transportation study in the previous post - find a likely journal, read tables of contents of a recent issue, see which jargon matches up with the problem you're trying to look at.  Full text searches are useless until you figure out the jargon, and tables of contents and abstracts are chock full of weird words that make perfect sense within a field and mean nothing (or something completely different) in the mundane world.

Firefox's Ubiquity, and the challenge: make searching your library as easy as searching Amazon

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.

Wall of books revisited: just what do I have checked out?

No, I still haven't found my overdue books, but at least now I know what they look like.

The AADL prints a helpful list of the books you have checked out, but doesn't give you pictures of them (not yet at least).  So I'm working on the Greasemonkey script that will insert cover images into that page.  This is not that, but a step along the way.

Again the PatREST system comes to the rescue - the books checked out list has the books listed by internal record numbers, so I have to do a transformation to generate the cover art.  Here's the script to go from record number to cover image:

#!/bin/sh

# recno to img - convert aadl record numbers to image links
curl --silent http://www.aadl.org/rest/record/$1 |
grep coverimglink |
sed -e 's/^.*xlink:href=.//' -e 's/\".*$//'

and here's a script that drives that one to generate a page full of HTML:

#!/bin/sh

# renew covers

for n in $(cat ~/tmp/renews.html | grep "record=b" | \
           sed -e 's/^.*record=b//' -e 's/\".*$//' )
do
    sh ./recno-to-img.sh $n | \ 
    sed -e 's/^/\<img src=\"/' -e 's/$/\">/'
done

where the "renews.html" file is a cached output of the previous script that renewed all my books.

Apologies for the quick and dirty sed scripts here; the important part of this is that the PatREST API has an attribute COVERIMGLINK with a link to the cover of the image of a record.  I'm scraping the renews page and not yet capturing all of the information I really need to get good details about what is and isn't overdue.  The AADL at least doesn't have a source of good cover art for DVDs, and so all of the Bob the Builder and Thomas the Tank Engine discs I'll have to catch by eye.

Here's the output (yes, these are what I have checked out; note that most of them are kid books and most of those are Boxcar Children)

How to renew all of your books from the command line

The Ann Arbor library makes it easy to renew your library books; it's one click once you've logged in.  I thought I'd make it zero clicks.  Here's how.

I'm on a Mac running Firefox, so I have two tools at my disposal: "curl", a command line tool for making web requests, and Firebug, a debugger for Firefox that gives you a ton of page information.  The v1.2 version of Firebug works with Firefox 3.0, so make sure your versions are in sync.  curl is stable and widely distributed on many systems (including MS-DOS and Amiga!) so that should be easy; there's a similar tool "wget" which should be a substitute.

With those two I was able to come up with this (edited very slightly so that it won't work for you):

#!/bin/sh
# renew all items
curl -b "PHPSESSID=b93f03330de3fe399e2e9659fc2c5898" \
  -d "itemsformsub=1&renewall_button=Renew+All+Items" \
   https://www.aadl.org/user/890

I'll decode this for you to replicate this yourself, or more to the point so I remember what the heck I did (and I can only imagine a handful of people who this is for, but just to bear with me in case one of them comes up with a better idea!)

The first -b argument takes a PHP session ID key, which is the cookie that the AADL site uses to authenticate you.  I dug that out of the page with Firebug, or you can find it without that under Tools / Page Info / Security / View Cookies.  The expiration date on that particular cookie was less than a month away, so this script will have to be fixed up periodically with a new auth key.

The second -d argument takes the form information to fill out.  In this case Firebug showed me the form on the page that I was looking to fill out, and once I had turned on "Net" debugging it gave me all of the fields I needed to send on the "post" tab of the POST transaction. 

The final argument is the page to post to, in this case my user id number on the site.

The command produces (prodigious) output, which I should next parse I suppose to tell me which books to read, which ones to find, and all that - all in good time.

The same approach (with all of the details changed, but the same tools) could work for you if your library system has a web based way to renew books.

Library book overdue reminders, a survey

I have some books that are overdue (hey how does that happen). Here's some ways that libraries are helping people remember that books need to be renewed, and other sorts of things that help out in the process.

First, the nature of the problem and a confession: Amanda has a problem with overdue library books:

Those who know me in real life often already know this fact, but I feel I have to confess it a bit more publicly to try to solve this problem once and for all. All my life, I’ve had problems returning books to libraries on time. There is a library in Osaka which, I’m sure, has my picture on the wall (with a caption saying “dangerous book-stealing foreigner” in polite Japanese). A rather embarrassing overdue library book situation arose in Germany when I realised my mother-in-law - we’d redirected our mail to her - would soon receive an overdue notice for Irvine Welsh’s book Porno - but it just took so long to read with all that irritatingly slang dialogue. And when I returned to Perth, the only way I was able to get a new library card was by using my new married name and “forgetting” about previously being a member of that library system.

So what do libraries do to help this out?

Overdue notices by postcard - Demco has a series of industrial style cards to notify you of your transgresssions.

Real Voice is pitching a service to libraries that delivers reminders by synthesized voice, SMS, and email; they also supply debt collectors with similar services.

Singapore libraries notify borrowers via SMS; you configure the details to set it up for how may days in advance you want it.

--

Jenny Levine has a good late 2007 survey of mashing on the library which has musings on library first applications of Twitter.

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This deserves to be longer, but I want to send it out.

Greetsaver - "wall of books" screen saver at the Ann Arbor District Library

The Ann Arbor District Library has released a fresh copy of its Greetsaver wall of books screen saver, which runs on the big screens welcoming you into the various library branches.

As requested by superpatron Ed Vielmetti, here's a fresh link to the latest and greatest version of our "GreetSaver", which welcomes patrons and visitors to various locations of the Library.

This should work on any Mac running OSX Leopard, but there's a bit of additional configuration that must be done. You need to subscribe to the AADL video podcast, and you need to put some awesome library pictures into a new folder called "GreetPics" inside your Pictures folder (~/Pictures/GreetPics for you terminal geeks out there).

Enjoy, and throw me a note if you have questions or want to mash it up.

If you want to edit this you'll need to have Quartz Composer, which is part of Apple's developer tools.

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