Great points Tim. All too often I see the attitude that the catalog is
an entity unto itself and should be kept separate from other resources
else the user get confused. I would love to see the ability for mashups
involving the catalog.
By the way, thanks for bringing the term "amazoogle" to my attention. I
missed its appearance. I like the idea of being able to refer to those
two giants with one word.
Mack
Tim Hodson wrote:
> 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!!).
--
Mack Lundy
Systems Librarian
College of William and Mary, Swem Library
malund_at_wm.edu
Office: 757-221-3114
Cell: 757-817-4069
Received on Wed Jun 14 2006 - 09:39:01 EDT