L&LR staff blog

As threatened, I was at BCU in Birmingham a week ago (30th Nov) for #middlemash. The morning after the official mashed library Pre-conference Networking Activity (PNA), a good few of us met on the train up to Perry Barr railway station near the campus.

One of @chriskeene's slides.

I’m not going to do a chronological write-up of the day (you can find other people’s here, here, here and elsewhere): instead here are five disconnected #middlemash-related statements…

1. I gave a presentation in the morning.

I’ve tidied up the slides a bit from the version created on the day (which were a bit last-minute), and added captions. Also, here’s the latest list of examples of subject feeds created using RefWorks:

Faculty of Agriculture, Food & Animal Sciences

• New books for Biological Sciences
• New books in the Holbeach LRC (Food Manufacture / Agriculture & Environment)

Faculty of Business & Law

• New books for the Lincoln Business School

Faculty of Health, Life & Social Sciences

• New books for Forensic Science
• New books for Psychology
• New books for Social Sciences
• New books for Social Work
• New books for Sport, Coaching & Exercise Science

2. I wave my hands around a lot when I speak.

3. Twitter got some serious hammer.

(Image: word cloud of #middlemash tweets, created using www.wordle.net)

Owen Stephens (OU) has already noted on his blog that this was one of the most ‘tweeted’ conferences he’s been to; it certainly felt that Twitter played an important fuction as a backchannel / reporting tool / way of opening up the discussions to people who couldn’t attend in person.

• Here’s a feed of #middlemash tweets
• I also like this – ranked list of hardcore tweeters (fifth!)

4. You can do good, practical stuff on the day.

At the first two Mashed Library events, I found it difficult – and a little bit intimidating – to get involved in the practical mashing activities. I tend to find I only start to have usable ideas several days after the conference ends.

So I was pleased that, suitably inspired by Tony Hirst’s Yahoo Pipes walk-through, I managed to take an idea that came up in conversation with Jo Alcock and turn it into something practically useful, there and then.

The idea was this:

It would be useful if subject librarians could be automatically notified about the existence of new editions of books on reading lists in their subjects.

The practical solution was ready-made, in the form of this pipe which makes use of OCLC’s xISBN web service.

So, mid-mash, I added an extra button to my existing new-book feed pipe, which takes the working ISBN for each book and throws it at the xISBN pipe – the result is a list, in RSS format, of all related versions of any particular book. Anyone can subscribe to this feed and – here’s the killer bit – be notified when a new edition (and thus a new ISBN) is added!

I can see this being a really useful addition to any bibliographic service, especially for the subject librarian or interested academic.

Gives…

I’m going to try and tweak this to make it prettier, then I’ll blog more substantially.

5. A summary of each of the presentations is on the #middlemash blog

Quite a few of the presentations are on slideshare, too.

[cetsEmbedRSS id='http://middlemash.wordpress.com/feed/' itemcount='5']

Next stop – hopefully – Liverpool in early 2010.

I’m at Birmingham City University on Monday for mashed library event No.3, a.k.a. #Middlemash.

I’m giving a lightning talk in the morning covering the work we’ve done on using RefWorks to create new-book RSS feeds; I’ll also be trying to raise interest around Joss’s and my project to develop Wordpress MU as a platform for a devolved union catalogue.

You can follow Monday’s discussions on Twitter, if you’re so inclined (hashtag #middlemash).

…this was a talk that Joss and I gave yesterday, around the idea of using WordPress MU + Scriblio + Triplify to create a semantic, union catalogue. Joss has already blogged it (and for some reason, for him Slideshare worked fine…?).

Paul and I have just presented our ‘lightning talk’ on the use of WordPress MU and Scriblio to create a platform for publishing multiple OPAC catalogues and then exposing the aggregate data as RDF using Triplify. I blogged about this idea a while back and this is the first presentation we’ve given. Not sure what people made of it. Too ambitious? Threatening? Confusing? All I know is that from where I’m standing, it would require a relatively small amount of funding to show it working in principle with a handful of library catalogues. The difficult part would be scaling it to work for 100+ catalogues (though bear in mind, wordpress.com hosts 6 million sites) and satisfying the politics of each institution. Still, that shouldn’t stop us from trying.

Edit (8th July) – slideshare.net does not seem to like displaying these slides on-screen, so here they are to download in MS PowerPoint format.

Here are the slides (on slideshare.net) of the 5-minute lightning talk I just gave at Mashed Library 2009, on using ticTOCs data to display e-journal ToC feeds, and on creating a new-titles feed with Yahoo Pipes, etc.

(With apologies to Christian Bök for the title.)

I’m going to the long-anticipated Mashed Library 2009 (“Mash Oop North“) tomorrow at the University of Huddersfield.

If you want to follow the action from afar, here’s what one of the organisers (guess who?!) has suggested in a post on the event blog:

If you’re wanting to keep track of what’s happening on the day, there’s a few things you can keep an eye on…

Twitter

The hashtag for the event is #mashlib09 and you can keep track using Twitter Search or Twitterfall.

Ideas from the event

We’ll be encouraging delegates to publish their ideas under a CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 licence and you’ll be able to see them all via this RSS feed.

Ian’s Text Wall

Ian McNaught, who works at Huddersfield Uni, has developed an experimental SMS Text Wall which we’ll be playing around with at the event. It currently works with Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

Videos

We’re hoping to video all 6 of the opening sessions. Unfortunately we’re not able to stream them live but we’ll try and make them available to view online as quickly as possible. (If any delegates have experience of putting video online, please make yourself known on the day!)

There’s also the useful Mashed Library Ning site at: mashedlibrary.ning.com

I’m very much looking forward to tomorrow’s event, mainly because last year’s (the inaugural, held in London) was so interesting, and also because this year I’ve got the chance to talk about a couple of the mashup-inspired things I/we’ve got in the pipeline. Also because of this, and due in no small part to this.

I’ll be tweetin’ wi’ t’ best of ‘em on the day, and I promise a full writeup (plus slides from my two ‘lightning talks’) when I get back.

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:

• About Talis Platform
• Talis Platform developers’ wiki
• UK Bibliographic Store

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.

• This isn’t the exact presentation that Paul gave on the day, but it contains some of the same slides. It’s well worth a quick look.

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

—–

*No, I don’t know why I call it “lunch” at a conference, when it’s “dinner” in all other situations.

I’m in here a couple of times, looking bemused. These were mostly taken by Dave Pattern (Huddersfield) and are on flickr.

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I’m at Birkbeck today for Mashed Library ‘08. Here’s a feed of my notes on a Learning Lab (micro)blog set up for the occasion.

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Paul

P.S. I am going to write this up formally, if you can’t follow my stream of consciousness notes…