June 19, 2006
Online Bookshelves
A new mailing list (NGC4Lib - Next Generation Catalogs for Libraries) has just started up and already some intersting things are appearing on it. Take this bookshelf browser, for instance, at Georgia Library (PINES):
Clicking on a book title gives a clear and informative record for it, as you might expect:
as well as a link to a bookshelf for the book author:
This would be a really neat interface to the Personal Bookshelf, I think.. It would also be great interface to our Library's new stock (which is available as a feed).... or as an interface to my Amazon wishlist.
I've been looking for some reason to explore this really neat idea for Consuming Amazon's Web API Directly with Javascript (via JSON and XSLT), and maybe a wishlist bookshel is it?
Similar in feel is Blogbridge, an online feed directory. The model seems to resemble the sorts of reading lists you might find at H20 Playlist or Squidoo, although the focus at Blogbridge is solely on organising feeds:
Each topic has it's own page too, of course...
My first thought was that this would be one way of trying to organise/present/manage a directory of feeds that are starting to appear around the OU, as well as providing a suitable spot to host links to internal and external bloggers, but when the Blogbridge meme mixes withthe Library Bookshelf, another alternative presents itself...
For example, how about using the Blogbridge interface as a model for an online Journal bookshelf (i.e. an online magazine rack), where the feed links to the table of contents, say, of a particular journal, and the screenshot is a picture of the journal cover.
There are a couple of ways of doing this of course - a 'current titles' shelf, with a 'copy' of the most recent edition of each journal, or shelves dedicated to particular journals (i.e. containing an archive of a particular journal) and so on.
Direct linking to full text of articles for open access content would be easy enough to set up, butwWhat would be really handy would be if the feeds for subscription journals could also be set up to link through your local OpenURL resolver to subscription/full text versions of each article.
Would this qualify as a Library Mashup Competition entry, I wonder?
Posted by ajh59 at June 19, 2006 11:04 AM"Would this qualify as a Library Mashup Competition entry, I wonder?"
I would have thought so.
Posted by: Paul Miller at June 19, 2006 12:11 PMI, for one, think doing something with feeds from journals could be really interesting - I have been playing with the idea for a while myself... ;-)
But how many publishers/aggregators are actually providing feeds? (Either with just links to new issues or TOCstyle, with items and details for each and every article.) So far I have only been able to find it from Ingenta, Blackewll Synergy and BioMedCentral.
This could actually be turned into a useful WebService in it's own right, I think. Provide the service with an ISSN and get e.g. an OPML-file containing URLs of related feeds in return.
Posted by: Magnus Enger at June 22, 2006 05:25 PMI just got a BlogBridge Library demo account yesterday, so started looking for feeds (I will post a review in the next few days, hopefully).
Oxford journals have current contents feeds and an OPML aggregate for all their jounrnals (though it is malformed - they are now going to check it themselves);
IEEE journals [[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/guide/g_tools_rss.jsp] provide current content feeds.
Ah - Liverpool University have a [http://www.liv.ac.uk/Library/techserv/ejrnl/rss.html] useful list of journal feeds
Zetoc [http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/rssjnllist.html] (british Library?) is good if you are in UK HEI.
I think the issn2feed idea is a great one. In thew short term I guess you could do this in delicious, for example, by tagging the feed with issn2feed and with the issn number (e.g. 0000-0000), then you just lookup delicious/issn2feed+0000-0000
That's a great idea for a quick solution! Thanks for the tips on other sources for journal-related feeds!
Posted by: Magnus Enger at June 23, 2006 10:57 AM