Mashed Library ‘08 – proper writeup
I promised to turn my as-it-happened notes from last week’s Mashed Library event into a proper, readable account of the day. A few other attendees have already written up their respective ‘takes’, including Tony Hirst, Paul Walk, Jo Alcock and organiser Owen Stephens, to whom credit is due.
Me, looking wide-eyed at Mashed Library '08. Photo by Dave Pattern.
Here’s my effort…
The day started interestingly enough, spotting Red Kites from the window of the train on the way down to London. Once I’d located Birkbeck College and the room under the library which was to be the venue for the day, it was straight on to connecting to Birkbeck’s e wireless network (the first challenge!).
This was more of an “unconference” than a traditional, speaker-driven event, with everyone tapping away at their laptops and nipping across the room to compare notes (and to get more coffee – the day’s catering was excellent!) throughout.
The first demo was from Rob Styles from Talis, who gave a quick explanation of some of the possibilities of their Talis Platform for searching and “augmenting” library (and other) data – a Harry Potter-themed example (Hogwarts’ finest kept cropping up through the day, which perhaps gives you an insight into the reading habits of systems-librarian types?) of a search of Talis’ test bib. data store created an RSS feed which was then ‘dipped’ (‘augmented’) with book cover images from another data store.
I certainly think we should take a look at Talis Platform and consider joining to their development network. I’ve already signed up to their mailing list / Google Group.
Some useful links:
Next, Tony Hirst from the OU ran through a number of freely available mashup-inspiring tools that can inspire people who “aren’t happy on the command line” (i.e. normal library workers!) to play with library data. Tony knocked together a series of lightning mashups, retrieving and presenting book cover images and Amazon reviews for a given ISBN, using a number of sites including:
- Amazon Web Services Made Simple
- Google Docs – spreadsheets can be used to scrape HTML pages and manipulate the data using familiar cell/formula operations
- Yahoo Pipes and the similar pipes.deri.org
- ThingISBN
I’ve already started mucking around with Yahoo Pipes to repurpose the data that’s locked up within services such as the A-to-Z; to create bespoke combined blog feeds for my own use, and (tentatively) on the XML output of HiP. I don’t doubt there’s more we could do (particularly involving the readily-available book-cover image collections that are out there), but as with a lot of this 2.0 stuff, it’s where to start?
Timm-Martin Siewert from Ex Libris was next up, demo-ing EL Commons, their rough equivalent to the Talis Platform – with the important difference that, at the minute, access is restricted to Ex Libris customers only. EL Commons provides usable APIs for various EL services, including Primo, Metalib, Aleph, etc. Timm was closely followed by Mark Allcock of OCLC, who showed a number of that organisation’s developer tools, including the WorldCat Developers’ Network.
I was impressed (and slightly overwhelmed!) by the range and number of OCLC’s reusable services which Mark mentioned, including registries of copyright information, journal ISSN history, and more. Some are restricted to OCLC members (although the Developers’ Network is not), but others are open to all:
- WorldCat Affiliate Services (not restricted to OCLC members)
Verdict – merits further investigation.
If your head is beginning to swim at this point, you’ve about reached the stage that I was at by now!
Aaaaaaaagh: code!!!!! Photo by Dave Pattern.
Last up before lunch was Ashley Sanders, a programmer at MIMAS. He spoke briefly and tantalisingly about some significant developments on the horizon for both COPAC and ZETOC, including better persistence of searches (presumably so they could be used in RSS feeds etc.) and a “modify record” tool that may be opened up to the community on the live service[s], once the question of authentication can be sorted.
Gratefully, on my part, we broke for lunch* (which was very good, again).
There were a number of interesting chats going on. In particular, around the OCLC’s “powergrab” (not my words!) of reuse-rights relating to catalogue records which it provides (a debate I’ve been following with mild interest) vs. a more “free”, creative-commons-Web2.0-hippy approach to making bibliographic data available for sharing. It was getting quite heated at one point (in a polite, librarianly way, of course).
I got more coffee.
The next bit of the day was the bit I struggled with most. Perhaps I’ve been conditioned to crave structure(!), but as people milled around, discussing ideas and working in small groups, I started to feel a bit on the periphery. As it was, I collared Rob Talis and got him to explain (patiently… and patiently over again…) how Talis Platform might be used in practice. After I’d asked a few daft questions it started to become a bit clearer (Rob – if you’re reading this, that’s not any reflection on your explanation, only on the time it takes for new ideas to sink in to my brain). At the time, I wrote:
“hadn’t realised this was entirely free (as developer) and unconnected to Talis LMS. I’m suffering from library-terminology disjoint syndrome at this point – different language / terms of reference.”
As with all of this stuff, I’m convinced you can only start to expose the value by getting stuck in and trying things out. Library2.0-in-theory doesn’t work.
My sanity was restored considerably at this point by Dave Pattern, who came over for a chat, and by the cakes and scones that started to appear (with more coffee). Dave and I talked about OPAC-wrapper / social-discovery-layer and metasearch applications (much, much more of which later…), the gathering and intelligent use of statistics, and Dave’s valuable tweaks and improvements to HiP.
My tags as I blogged on the day. Photo by Dave Pattern.
Credit also due to Dave for his photos, some of which I’ve used here.
The day wound up with one last presentation: this time from Paul Bevan, of the National Library of Wales. His was a talk I could identify with! Themes relating to geographic isolation (of Aberystwyth); a shift to virtual rather than physical visits to the library; institutional ‘buy-in’ and acceptance of the use of free 3rd-party social media applications; accessibility and the differing needs of different groups of users.
Finally, Owen got everyone in the room to shout out what they’d been working on through the day. I admitted that I was nervous about the idea that I was meant to have achieved something by the end of the day (ha, ha) and that I didn’t really have anything to show. Others had been working on some really interesting ideas, including lots of use of Yahoo Pipes to bring together information from Amazon, Wikipedia, Talis Platform et al., and a couple looking at deriving geodata from MARC geographic name headings, to display catalogue records (e.g. for items relating to a particular town or city) via a map interface.
Incidentally, I had my first real ‘Mashed’ idea on the train on the way home. I’m working on something quite interesting, and if it looks as if it’s got legs, I’ll post it here.
This was a fantastic day in many ways, with 1,000 ideas a second being generated. I did find it slightly frustrating… I just need time and a quiet room to get my brain around this kind of thing, and I felt that 80% was passing me by. The challenge, I think, for L&LR, will be to identify which services and techniques have real potential for sharpening up our own service, and putting appropriate time aside to develop them properly. Otherwise, I fear, it’ll ever be seen as a slightly eccentric hobby (“You do what with pipes!?”)…
Last set of links:
- Mashed Library ‘08 – Ning (social networking) site
- Google Alerts RSS feed
- Facebook site I set up after the event
I’ll certainly be looking forward to Mashed Library ‘09, and if possible I think two or three of us should go next time.
Paul
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*No, I don’t know why I call it “lunch” at a conference, when it’s “dinner” in all other situations.
[...] Paul Stainthorp (also see Paul’s live blog from the day) [...]
Good APIs Project » Blog Archive » Mashed Library
10 Dec 08 at 12:04 pm