L&LR staff blog

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.

…whether the subject is food or finance, or – in theory – any keyword you want, you can filter the RSS feed of new e-journals by constructing a link that looks like this:

• http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=mDjFxR1R3hGHC2SH0z6skA&Subject=XXXXXXXXX

Where “XXXXXXXXX” is your subject word.

That link creates html which you could link to within Blackboard (see illustration below – click for bigger). Or, to get the titles as RSS, just add &_render=rss to the end of the URL.

This is done using Yahoo! Pipes.

Many libraries, in HE and elsewhere, now display book cover images on their OPACs. Example (sorry, Dave): webcat.hud.ac.uk ~ no doubt, this is something we should be doing in the near future.

~~~

In the meantime, I was thinking how desirable it would be to similarly enhance the Electronic Journals A-to-Z with images of the journals it contains. But, while databases of book-cover image files are relatively well-known and accessible [Amazon, LibraryThing], I’ve not been able to find any such general collection of journal covers available for re-use by libraries – is it that periodicals are more jealously guarded by individual publishers?

Or is it that they’re out there somewhere, but that I’ve not been able to find them?

What I have discovered is that there’s at least one provider of academic e-journals that makes its cover images freely available for re-use: Elsevier, purveyors of ScienceDirect, whose cover image files “may be used in systems in which Elsevier Science material is offered to end users“.

I’ve used Elsevier’s directory of journal cover images (http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/products.cws_home/journal_cover_images_intro) to create a “Note” within A-to-Z admin, assigned to all ScienceDirect titles, which uses the ‘Link URL‘ fuction to display a journal cover image, matching the ISSN of the journal, on the live A-to-Z site.

Each image links to its journal home page.

~~~

Problem #1 – if there is no image matching a particular ISSN, the A-to-Z still tries to display an image, and the result is a “red X” missing-image icon (). Can we live with that, for a relatively small number of journals, at least until Elsevier add the missing images to their site (hint, hint)? I’ve tried to filter out the missing images using Yahoo! Pipes, but haven’t managed to get it to work, yet.

Problem #2 – more of a question, really: can I abstract this method to pull in images from other publishers’ sites? And which publishers actively allow this, or provide a dedicated service as Elsevier do?

In February, I wrote about  how I’d added more than 5,000 ticTOCs RSS feeds to the A-to-Z, so that researchers can easily find and subscribe to Table-of-Contents (ToC) updates from journals in their field. I think this is an indispensable current awareness service, and I’m pleased it’s being promoted at the ‘Working Smarter With the Web‘ workshops.

(An aside: that ticTOCs data is overdue to be re-generated and reloaded onto the A-to-Z. This is next on the long list of e-journal packages for the “e team” to review.)

That’s all well and good, but there’s a clear need for a current awareness service ‘one level above’ the individual ToCs. That is, we could (and should) be providing an RSS feed of new e-journal titles.

At the moment, the EBSCO A-to-Z platform doesn’t provide this feature (I really do hope it’s something that EBSCO are considering developing themselves), and so in the past we’ve had to resort to emails, spreadsheets, etc.—all with varying degrees of success—just to keep people up to date with what new e-journals have become available.

~~~

So, I’ve created a rough-and-ready working demo of a ‘New e-journals at Lincoln‘ RSS feed for the A-to-Z. It’s not supported by EBSCO, so it’ll require a bit of manual intervention to keep it running (it’ll be a nice five-minute daily task for the “e team” to take on!), but has the potential to be a really important enhancement to the e-journals service.

Next time you go to the A-to-Z site, you’ll see a new tab – next to the existing ‘Titles’ tab – which I’ve labelled ‘New Titles (RSS)‘. This new tab links to a page containing information about the RSS feed, with a prominent link to the feed itself, plus a display of the 10 most-recently-added titles in the feed.

The links in the ‘ten most recent…’ list should go directly to the A-to-Z record for that title. The feed link itself you can paste into your favourite feed reader (I use Google Reader). I’m working on enabling email subscription to the feed. We should also be able to take this feed and filter/manipulate it to create (for example) subject-specific lists in Blackboard.

I’ve also made the feed autodiscoverable (c.f. my earlier post), so it should display in the browser toolbar (this will vary between browsers).

This is how the feed is auto-discovered by Firefox browser.

I still need to do some work on creating better documentation for users of the feed, and for the process of adding new titles within L&LR.

I’ll also need to do a bit of testing to make sure everything’s working as it should be, and iron out my feed-validation bugs.

When the time is right, I’ll launch the service more publicly.

Paul

~~~

P.S. Here’s how I did it:

1. The first stage is the most clunky – it involves getting information about the newly-added titles out of the closed box that is the Electronic Journals A-to-Z. EBSCO provide a daily report (available only to administrators) of “Titles added to Packages in my Collection“. This data can be exported on a daily basis in tab-delimited format.
   
2. Next, I created a spreadsheet using Google Docs and published it to the Web. The tabbed data from the A-to-Z admin report is pasted in to the spreadsheet, so it becomes openly accessible. Using Google Docs also means that I can invite other people to act as editors of the spreadsheet, and create public web forms to add titles that don’t appear in EBSCO’s daily report (not all of our e-journal packages are managed by EBSCO, so the data will need supplementing when we add custom titles).
3. The data output of the Google spreadsheet is then fed into Yahoo! Pipes, an excellent application for ‘mashing up’ and processing data. You can inspect the Yahoo! pipe for yourself, at: http://pipes.yahoo.com/lincoln/newejournals. If you create an account on Yahoo!, you can clone this (or any) pipe and modify it to create your own data mashup.
   
4. The Yahoo! pipe takes the raw Google spreadsheet data, filters it according to various rules, and exports a valid * RSS feed of new items, in reverse order by date.
5. * Well, it’s nearly valid. I need to do a bit of cleaning up of the pipe (I did say this was a working demo), mainly so I can pass the feed through Feedburner, which will allow email subscriptions. But it works well enough!
6. Finally, I created the new tab on the A-to-Z public site, and added the details to the page (the ‘ten most recent’ list was created using feed2js). The code for the autodiscoverable feed was pasted into the top of our customised A-to-Z template.

~~~

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.

David Lee King has some suggestions… (picked up on UKeiG’s combined feeds Yahoo Pipe).

Warwick, Loughborough, Huddersfield, Durham, Exeter, Liverpool, UEA, Birkbeck… on facebook libraries all.