I strongly believe that if you are spending the time and money to pour data into a system then you should have the ability to harness that data in a way you see fit. If all you can do is export it back out then it’s really not complete. What I’m referring to is of [...]
Awhile back I attended Library Camp and was lucky enough to have some dicussions with Alan Gray of the Darien Library. It’s a small public library that’s doing it’s best to stay relevant to the community. Some of the programs he discussed were quite inspiring.
One of his concerns was the technology side of things and [...]
Another application that can be built on top of the XML Server is an IM bot. There are various libraries available for bots and having a way to easily get and transform the data from your ILS makes things much easier. The one below is on AIM and was built by Rob Casson of Miami [...]
I may be giving a presentation at the summer MIUG meeting regarding uses of the III XML Server. Regardless if that ends up occurring I figure I should post some of the applications here. I’m sure it will help the presentation as well if people fix all my mistakes The first of these is [...]
For more information on Library Camp check out the Library2.0 wiki.
This discussion went over the various hacks and problems that allow patrons to reuse information from the library or make it easier to use the library’s offerings. Some notes:
Jon Udell’s LibraryLookup Bookmarklet helps people move between Amazon and the OPAC. Problems included that it’s dependent [...]
I haven’t really tested it much in terms of actual use but I did find the interface interesting. I’ve been messing around with various interface ideas using the III XML Server and this gives another one for ideas. You can check it out yourself. There’s probably plenty of things I would change though. I’d probably [...]
For those III institutions not as adventurous as AADL, you may want to be able to pass the bib number for a record to your own scripts. In this way you can use the stock OPAC but still add functionality externally. I’ll give an example below and some other ideas at the end.
So let’s start [...]
FYI, if you try to access any of my XML server demo’s you’ll probably get an error message. We had to turn our xml server off for the time being due to some problems. I’m hopeful that it’ll be back on in the near future. Just a quick note that it’s not just my shoddy [...]
Featured lists are another thing I’d like to use more of. The ability to pull the latest books and other data from the server would be nice. While I figured out how to pull the information, the XML server appears to ignore my limiting and returns the whole list no matter what. This can be [...]
Before I forget to post this, David Walker was nice enough to drop me info on how to get the item information when getting bib results from the XML server. You can do this by appending the option of links=i1-10 to the end of the url. You also need to make sure you do the [...]
A terrifying title I’m sure. Unfortunately I’m not graced with SuperCat with such things like a bookbag api so I have to work with III url’s which aren’t pretty. I’ve recently been requesting quite a few books through our union catalog and wondered if there was a way to easily link to the request pages. [...]
Casey did a nice post of similar thoughts I’ve had:
OPAC Web Services Should Be Like Amazon Web Services « MaisonBisson.com
I’m going to go a step further and say it should be more than the Amazon Web Service. Since Amazon is a company and has various partners the data you can get through the services [...]
I’ve been experimenting with WordNet (SQL version) and Aspell to see about adding spelling and synonym suggestions to the output from the III XML server. One of the things I love about google is the way it offers suggestions and allows you to easily fix your search. Many failed searches can be fixed this way [...]
Since I already had some of our new books lists being converted to RSS, I went ahead and tried it out as a screensaver on my laptop which now has OSX Tiger. Here’s a screenshot (crappy quality - looks much better on screen):
An interesting idea and something that might be neat on public computers.
I’ve been working on various ideas for using our Innovative XML server. I first began with creating html views of featured lists. Once I had the syntax down I created RSS 2.0 feeds for the lists. While I was doing this I came across a post over at open-ils that referred to OpenSearch. I had done a little with OpenSearch when it first came out but not since I started playing with the XML server. BTW, I recommend reading the whole post over at open-ils. Lots of great thinking in it.
I’ve worked with a lot of Open Source software so I’m used to documentation that is lacking, but for a commercial product I have to say that the Innovative XML server has some of the worst I’ve seen. I’ve managed to create an OpenSearch module and RSS output (more details soon). To do this I [...]
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ebyblog is the blog of Ryan Eby. The opinions contained in are my own and likely the opposite of my employer and everyone else.
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