Building a smarter catalogue

An important part of building a smarter catalogue that has relevency,
ranking, thesauri help, authority control, and who knows what else, is to
have it pervasive.

Google has recently released an API to do little nifty search things, Amazon
for a long time has allowed developers to pull info from their catalogue and
show it in blog tool pluggins and all sorts of other places.

The library catalogue?  We're still sitting on that shouting "no, no, it's
mine hands off" (figuratively).  we have to make our catalogue work for us.
It is after all our major digital information asset, and probably the only
digital asset that we have full control over.

We need to give users a little snippet of javascript that they can copy and
paste into their blog to show which books they are reading.  We need to let
the local history group have a list of relevent books on their website.  We
cold even devolve the requesting of books to other websites - allow the
local history group to have a button to click that would fire a user into
the catalogue to request the item.  The website owner could accrue points
allowing himm to rent a video or two free every now and then...

We need to stop thinking of the library catalogue as an entity with a single
point of contact through the beautifully designed
interface-with-many-search-options that had lots of money spent on it.  We
need to open up the raw data, allow people to use the data in new ways.
Ultimately, if a user finds a reference to a book that is held in your
library on a third party website, if you have provided that website with
free and easy tools to provide a service that links back to you, that has to
be good.

Why do you think amazooogle is so big?  simply put, it is because of the
viral effect of their products (note the plural!!).

Tim
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Tim Hodson
informationtakesover.co.uk
www.timhodson.co.uk