An interesting informal, internal project I found out about a week or two ago that sprang up out of a bet, so I believe ("So Tom if you manage to setup a running system (technology + people) which captures over 50% of what is on the shelves in KMi and maintains this for at least 3 months I'll buy you a bottle of champagne (or equivalent other alcohol)") which provides a nicely rendered listing of the books in on your shelf given just their ISBN numbers.
The project is called Bookshelf, and the way it works is this:
You provide a text file containing the ISBNs of books on your bookshelf. A PHP script then reads the text file, looks up each of the ISBNs using the Amazon.co.uk Web Services API, collects all the results and displays them together in one list. If you're using a recent browser like Firefox then some XSLT code transforms the XML from Amazon into XHTML to provide a human readable version.
If you have OU intranet access you can see a presentation all about it.
The guys who've been developing the Bookshelf (as an aside to their PhD work, apparently - amazing what a postgrad will do for a free drink!) are Tom Heath and Mark Gaved - their day job projects look equally interesting too.
A few days after seeing the demo, another similar app crossed one of my in-feeds: Delicious Library. SImilar effect, but the execution seems a little more laboured to me.
Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how both of these progress...
[Update: it'd be neat if the chaps could work Amazon RSS wishlists into the mix somehow, perhaps brokering who you might borrow books on your wishlist from, based on their bokshelf items?]
PS Just because, anyone interested in this sort of thing who hasn't already come across LibraryThing should probably go and check it out.
PPS Anyone know if there's anyone looking at a book info microformat? [Here's some work on a citation microformat and here's the OpenURL inspired CoINS book reference description.]
Posted by ajh59 at March 15, 2006 09:53 PM