L&LR staff blog

Joss has beaten me to blogging this, so rather than think for myself I’m just going to quote him in full.

Yesterday, I submitted a proposal to Talis under their Incubator fund. If successful, I would have the pleasure of working with Paul Stainthorp, E-Resources Librarian at the University of Lincoln, and Casey Bisson,  Information Architect at Plymouth State University. The bid is to develop an idea which I’ve posted about before, based on Casey’s work on Scriblio and our adventures with WordPress MU, in particular, JISCPress.

Anyway, rather than re-iterating the bid here. You can read it in full by clicking here.

Comments are very welcome. Thanks.

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).

Joss Winn has blogged about a possible next stage in developing our idea of using WordPress MU+Scriblio+Triplify to create a flexible, devolved ‘union-catalogue-lite‘ Web2.0-age OPAC ecosystem. It’s going to require funding, and clearer thinking.

Our lightning presentation received a muted response at Mash Oop North, but I’m sure that there’s a corker of an idea in here somewhere. Over to Joss:

“Imagine that JISC, Talis or Eduserv offered such a platform to UK university libraries. It could be a service, not unlike wordpress.com, where authorised institutions, could self-register for a site and easily import their OPAC, apply a theme, tweak some CSS, choose from a few useful plugins, and within less than a day or two, have a branded, cutting-edge search and browse interface to their OPAC, running under their own domain.”

…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.