Encyclopodia – the encyclopedia on your iPod

GeoCool! – Rasmus’ Toys Page

IE7 and OpenSearch Autodiscovery

Information Management Now: Social Tagging For The Enterprise

Ryan Eby got me excited about S3 a while ago when he pointed out this post on the Amazon web services blog and started talking up the notion of building library-style digital repositories.

I’m interested in the notion that storage is being offered as a commodity service, where it used to be closely connected to servers and bought (and wasted) in chunks. With S3, you can build a simple application that runs anywhere, store your big data in S3, pay for what you use, and expand (or contract) as you need to.

It’ll take a while but this could really change our application and system design. I’m just interested in seeing what comes of it.

amazon, amazon web services, aws, commodity service, internet applications, ryan eby, s3, simple storage service

A chat with Ryan Eby, also an Edward Tufte fan, elicited this line about another reason we continue to struggle with the design of our catalogs:

data isn’t usable by itself
if it was then the OPAC would just be marc displays

And yesterday I was speaking with Corey Seeman about how to measure and use “popularity” information about catalog items. It got me thinking about Flickr’s interestingness metric, which seems to combine the number of times a photo has been “favorited,” viewed, and commented. In a related fashion, I’ve been looking at ways to track the terms people use to find catalog items and use those to help improve search results. A basic form of this is in the OPAC prototype I demonstrated yesterday.

And all of this has me looking forward to Aaron Krowne’s Quality Metrics presentation at code4lib.

library, libraries, opac 2.0, library catalog, popularity, search ranking, data visualization, ryan eby, corey seeman, metrics, search rank, opac, library 2.0

A9, the search engine from Amazon.com, does some pretty interesting things that libraries should be aware of. First, any library considering a metasearch product should look at what can be done for free, and second, libraries should take a look at the OpenSearch technology that drives it.

So now, when searching for Harry Potter, you’ll also find relevant results from Plymouth State University’s Lamson Library. We’re not the first library — I think Seattle Public was — and my work mostly follows the cookbook written up by Ryan Eby, of Michigan State University Libraries. Thanks also go to our university IT sysadmins who installed the XSLT extension for PHP5 earlier this week.

tags: a9, lamson library, metasearch, michigan state university, opensearch, plymouth state university, ryan eby, search engine, search engines, search technology, seattle public library, university, web search, websearch, xslt