Libraries & Networked Information

Where did this come from? Innovative calls it “Web Works,” and describes them as “HTML-based interfaces for light-weight system access.” Here’s the program description:

WebWorks are new products that offer focused functionality for staff through a lightweight browser-based client. One Web Works client handles Selection List processing while a cataloging client provides the ability to add and edit records.

The session was hugely crowded, and I had to run off before I got to ask my question: “how do these fit in with any web services strategy III may be developing?”

…And then I found myself thinking: I’d really like III to focus on providing a great basic product first, then develop a great back-end web services interface for those who want to do more, then, if they must, use that back-end to build special applications as clients demand them. As it is, each new customer who waves an invoice around gets to ask for some weird product or change to a product, but I’m not clear on how they all connect or are supportable in the long run.

The example below uses a JavaScript to display bibliographic details about an item in Plymouth State University’s library catalog.

Now imagine this link included information on the availability of the item, and a button to request or reserve it….

This post is intended to demonstrate how library catalog data can be used in places far from the catalog, perhaps in Blackboard/WebCT, blogs, or elsewhere. I’m at the Innovative Users Group 2005 Conference, where I’ll use this post in my presentation on XML Server, session L5.

According to the website, MITRE is:

a not-for-profit company that provides systems engineering, research and development, and information technology support to the government. It operates federally funded research and development centers for the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Internal Revenue Service, with principal locations in Bedford, Massachusetts, and McLean, Virginia.

All of this is interesting because BlogsOfWar points out that they’ve been presenting information on a project titled BlogINT: Weblogs as a Source of Intelligence (with slides in PDF format):

We will collect high volumes of information from weblogs and traditional television and Web-based news media. To characterize content, we will compare weblogs and traditional media using the method developed in MITRE’s Retrospective Source Analysis project. We will build spatio-temporal models of events from weblogs and compare these to ground truth for another assessment of accuracy, level of detail, and value.

The presentation is part of MITRE’s 2005 Annual Technology Symposium held at their campuses in Massachusetts and Virginia. The McLean event was April 13th, but the Bedford event isn’t until May 5th.

I wonder if I can still get tickets?

Thank or blame Jenny Levine of TheShiftedLibrarian for this: I’ve just created a “Libraries and Networked Information” category here. More to come.

Copyfight went somewhat off topic to point out Joshua Porter’s paper on How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content at User Interface Engineering. This quote says exactly what I needed:

Every time someone makes a list, be it on a blog […] or a list of groceries, content is aggregated. The act of aggregating content (usually content that is alike in some way) makes it more understandable. Instead of looking at a whole field of information, you choose smaller, more logical subsets of it in the hopes of understanding those. After you’ve done that, you can apply what you’ve learned to the whole, or even just a larger subset.

Why did I need it? It’s all about my working days developing applications for to support academic libraries. The value of a library catalog in the internet age isn’t always in the books (they are valuable, though), but in the taxonomies and metadata that surround them. OPACs are information dense resources that can be used to help select resources that exist in less strict taxonomies (folksonomies, perhaps), and with less detailed metadata.

Yes, Porter’s paper is really about RSS, but parts is parts, right?

Michael Stephens’ Twelve Techie Things for Librarians 2005 deserves a look. User-centered technology planning, RSS, acnd convergence lead his list, but other items speak directly to the role of the library in the internet age.

We’re looking at ENCompass for Digital Collections and Resource Access here. It’s an expensive product, but has a lot of interesting and useful features.

Some sites we looked at in the demo today included New Zealand National Library, UT Dallas, and Alabama Mosaic.

ArsTechnica and bookofjoe both heralded the beta release of Google Scholar. My questions: “is it accessible via the Google API,” and, “what does this mean for academic libraries?” I’ll be exploring both in time.

In the meantime: Library Portal Integration.

Teleread reports:

RedLightGreen.com, a creation of RLG, searches through 120 million books based on such criteria as author’s name, title, and subject matter. Not full text search–but still useful.

Over at RedLightGreen, they say it “helps you locate the most important books and other research materials in your area of interest, and find out whether what you need is available at your favorite library.”

Jon Udell has been working on LibraryLookup and other mechanisms for finding library content on the web. In the meantime, LibraryTechtonics, Library Stuff, and The Shifted Librarian have picked up on it.

Part of it is about OCLC making their records available to search engines. Now both Yahoo! and

Google in the game. So what you do is put your ISBN in the properly formatted URL and you’ll be given links to libraries that hold it: via Google and via Yahoo!.

Of course, you can go elsewhere to play with ISBNs. There’s fun to be had at Amazon, Powell’s, Booksense.com, and AllConsuming.net.

Lamson Library’s portal integration project tops Google’s search hits for “library portal integration.” I’ve been crowing about it all over campus for a week now, and while you can argue about what real value it has, it’s still exciting.

Information about Lamson Library’s portal integration at Plymouth State University. I’ll expand this story later, but I want to put the link here now to get it in Google’s index.

Elaine Allard and I will be presenting on Library Portal Integration at the IUG 2003 in San Jose, CA. Two sessions have been scheduled for Sunday, April 28th: 9am and 4:30pm.

Our description, in the program guide:

Like many colleges, Plymouth State College is working to consolidate its online resources inside a portal. Within this single point of service students can register for classes and check their grades, faculty can review their rosters and post grades, and staff can review benefits and vacation time. This presentation describes how the PSC’s Lamson Library became part of the portal party so that patrons can view their record and access WAM-protected databases — all inside the portal. The presentation will include technical aspects of integration between our portal (Campus Pipeline), student information system (POISE, moving to BANNER), and library system (Innovative, of course), as well as some brief discussion of the politics and philosophy of this integration.

At the IUG 2003 Site: Library Portal Integration. More information at the Plymouth State University site: Library Portal Integration.