Science Library Pad

Zotero 2.0 - DLF Fall Forum - Nov 6, 2007

raw presentation notes

Zotero

Trevor Owens

"The Fluidity of Bibliography"

Smart Bib: easy metadata embedding
(coins embedded)

Read Write Bib (using Wikipedia exmaple)

Visualizing Bib (using Simile Timeline)

Smart Bib:
demo of grabbing embedded bib info from a web page

Zotero 2.0 - Zotero Server
* shared collections and notes
* scholarly groups in macro- and micro- disciplines, official groups
* recommendations
* bibliographic feeds
* APIs

Q: Where is the server
A: One server, at Zotero (Center for Media), closed source

Q (me, paraphrased): Will there be server API usage limitations?  We might like to send queries to retrieve recommendations every time someone does a search, that could be a lot of traffic.
A: TBD... it will be mostly constrained by server performance and capacity

Rethinking Resource Sharing 2007 Forum

Creating a new global service framework that allows individuals to obtain what they want based on factors such as cost, time, format, and delivery. This framework will encompass promoting and exposing library services in a variety of environments.

Forum III 2007

April 19-20, 2007
Chicago, IL

http://www.rethinkingresourcesharing.org/

In a comment on "Rethinking Resource Sharing: Get It", Gail Wanner says

We’ll also be looking for testers, interface programmers, and developers to take the [Get It] extension even further should people want an opportunity to assist with this user driven initiative.

presentation on library services 2.0

You know it's strange, I don't really browse videos on YouTube or photos on Flickr, but I do find all sorts of stuff of interest on SlideShare.  I guess because I am an information junkie.

I found a great presentation Services 2.0 dans les bibliothèques vers des bibliothèques 2.0 ? that covers the various aspects of integrating your library into web browsers and into other web sites, as well as improving your own library site.

The author of the presentation blogs at BibliObsession.net.  It's in French.  Be warned there are some possible NSFW images there.

(If for some reason you're interested in the discovery chain, it was via Mediapolis who favorited my Web 2.0 presentation, to the presentation Blogs et wiki : outils et phenomenes - it was third in the "related slideshows".)

Operator - microformat detection for Firefox

Mozilla Labs [has released] Operator, a microformat detection extension developed by Michael Kaply at IBM. Operator demonstrates the usefulness of semantic information on the Web, in real world scenarios.

Mozilla Labs Blog - Introducing Operator

via Just a Gwai Lo

Rethinking Resource Sharing: Get It

Somehow this managed to fly beneath my radar, it looks like because it's people talking document delivery / ILL language to other librarians, rather than people talking Web Services to library IT people.

Here's what I discovered

A browser plugin which annotates web pages with links to “getting” options for published resources held by libraries

The GET-IT plugin scans web pages for book-like resources and attempts to annotate the page with “getting” options provided by libraries, tailored where possible to the user.

from Kent Fitch's presentation A New paradigm for “getting” (PowerPoint) from Libraries Australia Forum 2006 (LAF06)

I have to express some mild annoyance, mixed with hope, to read statements like

Mission of the [Resource Sharing] Initiative

* Create a new global service framework that allows individuals to obtain what they want based on factors such as cost, time, format, and delivery.
* This framework will encompass promoting and exposing library services in a variety of environments.

from presentation Rethinking Resource Sharing (PDF) by Candy Zemon, given at NISO Workshop Discovery to Delivery, November 3, 2006.

A "global service framework", hmm, where have I heard that before, it's almost as if they want to build an architecture based on services, how shall I put it, a sort of "Service-Oriented Architecture".

No offence to librarians, but if you want to build an SOA, how about actually calling it an SOA, and working with the Web Services and SOA working groups?  Does everything have to be a separate initiative with a giant Steering Committee that uses special language ("Resource Discovery") so that no one outside knows what they're talking about?

Why can't we all get along?  And speak a common technology language?

Isn't the Get It button already used by OpenURL resolvers?  Is this going to make things simpler, or more confusing?  Are the LibX people involved?  Are we going to end up with a bunch of competing browser extensions?

Apparently you can attempt to find some information starting points at
http://www.ala.org/rusa/stars/

Here's my modest proposal:

1. Let's have a single, shared set of terminology and a single, shared library Service-Oriented Architecture

2. Let's make one high-functionality browser extension and lobby Microsoft, Firefox et al. to have it included in the default installs

 

urns to contain your identifiers: isbn, lsid

A URN is a syntax that, amongst other things, you can embed on a web page, like a URL.

There is an IETF RFC 2288 from 1998, status "informational":
Using Existing Bibliographic Identifiers as Uniform Resource Names

It puts forward the following URN syntaxes:

urn:isbn:
urn:issn:
urn:sici:

The SICI code, which is new to me, is a standard syntax for constructing a string to identify a particular journal issue or article.

RFC 3187, from 2001, investigates the ISBN URN further:
Using International Standard Book Numbers as Uniform Resource Names

RFC 3044, also from 2001, expands on the ISSN URN:
Using The ISSN (International Serial Standard Number) as URN (Uniform Resource Names) within an ISSN-URN Namespace

ISBN and ISSN are both registered namespaces; SICI is not:
http://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-namespaces

There's a good posting URNs, bibliographic citations in web authoring from benmeadowcroft.com

So... where are all the blogs that use urn:isbn?
Where are the websites?  Not used on Amazon... not used on Chapters... not used in Google Book Search... not used in Innovative catalogue output...
I see lots of examples of people talking about the theory of how they could be used... but I don't actually see anyone using them.

Are we back to the Semantic Web trap I talked about before in my posting in which I learn the HTML acronym tag?

Is it a tool problem?  Do we need more and better Firefox extensions for urn:isbn?
The only one I could find in Mozilla Extensions is URN Support, which will point ISBN URNs to Amazon.

Anyway, this leads me to LSIDs.
LSID is a proposed Life Science IDentifier, one of many projects working to address the data issue pointed out by Dr. Lyon in her presentation: "Persistent identifiers for data citation".

First, here are some links via Glen Newton:

Resolver: >> http://lsid.sourceforge.net/

Article: >> Bio-IT World, January 2004 LSID: An Informatics Lifesaver

Excamples: >> http://lsid.biopathways.org/

Spec: >> http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/apps/doc?dtc/04-05-01.pdf

Purely by coincidence, I happened to then be reading iPhylo, just to come upon a couple relevant postings:

February 9, 2006  Globally Unique Identifiers

I attended the TDWG-GUID workshop on Global Unique Indenitifers (GUIDs) held at NESCent, which has issued a report. Essentially, the aim of this work is to deploy globally unique identifiers for digital objects in biodiversity informatics, such as taxon names, specimen records, images, etc. The workshop settled on LSIDs (Life Science Identifiers), which is a sensible choice.

LSIDs have been around, and there is considerable software support from IBM (see their project on SourceForge). I've used them in my Taxonomic Search Engine. Not everybody is thrilled by LSIDs (see Anyone using LSID? on NodalPoint).

February 15, 2006  LSID Firefox extension update

I've updated my extension to resolve LSIDs in Firefox so that it works with version 1.5.0.1 (the most recent version of Firefox). The extension is available from Mozdev. It may take a little while for the mirrors to update with the new version, so if you get a "404" when trying to download, you may need to come back later.

IBM's LSID project have their own Firefox extension LSID Launchpad for Firefox, which is a lot slicker than mine. It's in beta, but well worth a look.

The next part is perhaps a technical detail, but somewhat confusing to me:

urn:lsid:ubio.org.lsid.zoology.gla.ac.uk:namebankID:10386 becomes clickable, and you can see the metadata associated with the LSID. For the technically minded, they add support for the lsidres protocol to Firefox.

So should it be urn:lsid, or this lsidres:urn:lsid?  Why do you need lsidres?

A side note, and a question:
1) LSID does not appear to (yet) be an IANA registered URN namespace
2) Are there any issues with just assuming that urn:isbn: should also take an ISBN13?

So what do you think?
It seems to me people push very hard on this Semantic Web / Structured Blogging / Microformats / COINS stuff, but it doesn't seem to be getting much traction.

So we all work to promote the use of urn:isbn, with a browser extension that resolves to your choice of libraries and booksellers?  Should we be lobbying Amazon, our OPAC vendors, and everyone who outputs web pages with ISBNs to start wrapping them with urn:isbn?

Jon Udell's LibraryLookup gets xISBNified and more

We now return to our regularly scheduled technology boosterism :)  Now featuring extra jargon!

Jon Udell's LibraryLookup was an inspired idea about "living where your users are" - finding ways to link from online resources your patrons are already using, like Amazon, into your library's holdings.

It was his original work that inspired a lot of the library Web Browser Extensions that are now available.

Before I get into his article, here's a Terminology Watch: workflow is hot.  The ability to compose, or orchestrate services, is an essential element of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).  It is a key element of advanced software engineering practices.  (In the context of Web Services, WS-BPEL runs on a controlling server in order to do the orchestration.)

LISnews pointed me to Jon Udell's latest thinking, published in InfoWorld: The browser as orchestrator.

It’s been a busy week for my LibraryLookup project, which first launched in December 2002. In its original and still most widely deployed incarnation, LibraryLookup is a JavaScript bookmarklet that connects an Amazon book page to the corresponding record in a library catalog. The success of this technique got me thinking about themes I’ve pursued ever since: the dynamics of user-driven innovation, the protean flexibility of RESTful (Representational State Transfer) Web applications, and the dynamics of lightweight service orchestration.

LibraryLookup’s failures were equally instructive. As are other kinds of Web apps, library catalogs weren’t (and mostly still aren’t) designed for this kind of integration. It doesn’t require much, just an unencumbered search URL. Although some catalog vendors provide one, there are a number of others that still don’t.

The information architecture of the book world was another [problem]. ISBNs don’t uniquely identify books. There’s one for each hardcover and paperback edition, so the ISBN number in your browser had to match the one you looked up in the catalog. On my blog, I wished for a service that would unify these variants, and about a year ago, the Online Computer Library Center granted my wish. It deployed an experimental service called xISBN that maps a book’s ISBN to the whole set for that book.

Although a bookmarklet can splice a pair of services together, it can’t combine three or more services without relying on some kind of external orchestrator. That was more than I wanted to build and support, so the project was relegated to the back burner for a while.

This week, however, I recalled that I already had one kind of orchestrator in place. It connects my Amazon wish list to my RSS reader, by way of a library catalog lookup. If a book isn’t available in the library when I’m visiting the Amazon page, but later becomes available, I’m notified via RSS. The orchestrator in this case is just a Python script that’s scheduled to run daily. It was easy to extend it to use xISBN, so I did.

I had earlier shown this RSS notifier in a screencast about client-side intermediation. There I also showed a Greasemonkey script that rewrites an Amazon book page on the fly when it finds that book in the library. Could the Greasemonkey script also be extended to orchestrate a collection of services?                              

Yes, and you can find the gory details on my Weblog. Here, I’ll just summarize my conclusions. First, I’m bullish on client-side intermediaries and orchestrators. For me, at least, this is the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) endgame. Service composition in the browser can, and will, nicely complement service composition in the cloud.

The blog entry is Further adventures in lightweight service composition.

I normally avoid posting and dissecting code here, but I broke the rule last Thursday and will again today because my latest round of LibraryLookup work highlights interesting opportunities for service composition at the tolerant end of the tolerance continuum. Last week's adventure was a lightweight service orchestration that connects Amazon's wishlist to RSS, by way of the OCLC xISBN service and a local library catalog. Among other things, that composite solved a longstanding problem with LibraryLookup: an ISBN identifies just one manifestation of a work -- e.g., paperback versus hardcover -- not all of them.

The OCLC's xISBN service goes a long way toward solving this problem. Feed it one ISBN, and it returns a cluster of related ISBNs. A couple of years ago, when OCLC first announced xISBN, there was no way LibraryLookup bookmarklets could exploit it directly. An external intermediary was needed. And in fact that's still true, because bookmarklets can't handle multi-step service orchestration.

The RSS notifier I showed last week isn't subject to that constraint. It can be implemented in any general-purpose programming language, and deployed on any machine with Internet access and the ability to schedule periodic batch jobs.

The next logical step was to add xISBN capability to the Greasemonkey-based version of LibraryLookup that's shown (along with wishlist/library-availability notification) in the screencast Content, services, and the yin-yang of intermediation. In theory this should have been a snap. I already had a Greasemonkey script that was calling one service -- the library catalog -- using the keystone of AJAX, XMLHTTPRequest. How hard could it be to add a second service to this application?

Harder than I thought, as it turned out.

...

Anyway, here's the script. If you adapt it for your OPAC, let me know. The coolest way to let me know would be to tag it in del.icio.us (or elsewhere) with librarylookup, greasemonkey, and xisbn. Similarly, if you adapt Thursday's wishlist notifier, it would be cool to tag it with librarylookup, wishlist, and notification. That'll make it easy to collect a range of implementations and consider how best to generalize them.

The wishlist notifier post is Adventures in lightweight service composition.

Three years after I started the LibraryLookup project, people are still regularly discovering and enjoying the ability to automatically broker a connection between Amazon (or another book site) and their local libraries. In a screencast entitled Content, services, and the yin-yang of intermediation I showed a more advanced version of the conventional bookmarklet: a Greasemonkey script that modifies an Amazon page to include a notice about the book's availability in my local library. The screencast ends with a demonstration of another kind of connection brokering. If a book isn't available at the library, I add it to my Amazon wishlist. Then, when it becomes available at the library, it shows up in a special RSS feed that watches my Amazon wishlist.

It's a great example of lightweight service composition. Recently I was reminded that I'd never published the code, so I've included it below. This small Python script orchestrates three different services. First, it queries the Amazon wishlist by way of Amazon's API. Second, it queries the OCLC's xISBN service [1, 2] to convert the single ISBN into a cluster of related ISBNs. Third, it queries my library's OPAC system for each of those related ISBNs.

Previously:
April 28, 2005  library interfaces that live where your users are: handling changes
April 04, 2005  Jon Udell screencasts about library web rewriting

user scripts for Amazon integration / greasemonkeying your library

It seems I have not done a good job of tracking user scripts for Firefox, despite the fact that I think transforming the content of web pages you visit ("living where your users are") is one of the most powerful capabilities libraries should be leveraging.  In fact, one may wonder whether it's worth putting effort into upgrading the OPAC interface - why not just build more user scripts?

Here are the ones I have quickly gathered

• Book Burro (mentioned indirectly on August 14, 2005)
• Seattle Public Library
• Palo Alto Library
• Melvyl (University of California libraries)
• KVK (Germany)
• Lakeland Library Co-op (West Michigan)
• New York Public Library
• Toronto Public Library
• Timberland Regional Library (Washington State)
• Cass District Library (Michigan)
• Ann Arbor District Library (AADL, in Michigan)
• St. Joseph County Libraries (Indiana)
• University of Huddersfield (UK) by Dave Pattern reported by Lorcan Dempsey
• Open WorldCat
• more in a big list at http://dunck.us/collab/ in GreaseMonkeyUserScriptsSpecific: Amazon
• another big list at http://userscripts.org/tags/library

If you need help, you might try dunck.us GreaseMonkeyUserScriptRequest

I have added all of the above to

http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=Web_Browser_Extensions#User_Scripts

Please feel free to contribute to that wiki page.

Also see panlibus: Greasemonkey - one brand of Library 2.0 glue.

Previously:
November 12, 2005  (Grease)Monkeywrenching the Library
March 31, 2005  metapages - add your own content to web pages
March 06, 2005  hacking web content

how to: create a Firefox search plugin

A common question, and libdev has produced a detailed answer, using Open WorldCat as an example.

I have added this info to LibSuccess: Web Browser Extensions.

search plugin excitement

Some buzz around Firefox search plugins from LCLS Labs from Shifted Librarian and Tame The Web.

Incidentally, we have been updating the Firefox extensions on CISTI Lab.
Apologies for the site, it is still very beta, lots of the links don't work yet.
We'll try to get it fixed up a bit better in the new year.

I think the contact form on Lab is working now, if not, please contact me if you have any questions about the site or the extensions.

How does a "build your own Firefox extensions" workshop sound :)
I don't know what venue would be appropriate.  For example, Access 2006 might make sense, but many of the people who attend are already pretty technical, so I don't know how much value it would add for them.
Maybe a hackfest to build extension-builders for each major catalogue type, in the same way Jon Udell's LibraryLookup build-your-own is set up for the major catalogue vendors?

The contributors to LibSuccess: Web Browser Extensions have also tried to provide as much info as possible about library-related extensions, including links to tutorial information.  Please feel free to add your own relevant links to the LibSuccess wiki.

Previously:
January 31, 2005  CISTI catalogue Firefox search plugins
February 12, 2005  experimental CISTI sidebar for Firefox
March 15, 2005  CISTI experimental sidebar 0.2
March 25, 2005  CISTI bookmarklets
October 10, 2005  ILI2005 - presentation - Web Browser Extensions

Firefox extensions for Connotea

Connotea is a social bookmarking tool for scientists.
There are Two New Tools For Firefox Users, one that greasemonkeys an add-to-connotea link into PubMed results, and a search plugin.

Furl Firefox extensions

I use Furl for all my work-related bookmarks (library technology, information security etc.) - http://www.furl.net/members/rakerman

Via Contentious I find a couple handy tools:

• Firefox search plugin that searches your own Furl bookmarks (My furl archive)
• Firefox toolbar from Furl

Google likes to watch...

Google doesn't want to be evil... but The Corporation is evil by design.

So their latest thing is finding ways to watch where you are going on the web.
Internally I'm sure this is justified as a way to improve their link rankings.

Google started with the Toolbar with PageRank turned on.
In order to calculate PageRank for each page, it has to contact Google and tell them what page you're visiting.  To be fair, it does put up a privacy notice.

Then there was Sidebar, which also seems to know what you're looking at.
There's also desktop search and such.

They try to offer you "free" functionality in exchange for knowing where you are going.
Now there are a couple handy Firefox extensions:

• Blogger Web Comments for Firefox The Blogger Web Comments Extension sends the URLs of pages that you visit to Google, so that we can search for and identify blogs that talk about that page.
• Google Safe Browsing (USA only).  An anti-phishing toolbar. If you enable Enhanced Protection, the Google Safe Browsing Extension will provide more up-to date protection by sending the URLs of sites that you visit and limited information about the site content to Google for evaluation.

So just be aware of this, when you're installing new Firefox extensions and such.

via Google blog - New Firefox extensions
Note: Google blog links are broken, I only got there from Google Labs - Google Extensions for Firefox.  It seems the links don't work without "index.html" on the end at the moment.

Also consider Google cookies: the search pages themselves want to drop cookies.  The toolbar wants to give you a cookie.  And of course, Google Analytics is in a whole other league of user tracking, including pushing a cookie (to, amongst other things, distinguish new visits from revisits).

But a while ago I noticed that the Google Blogger button, you know, that harmless "I Power Blogger" button you have to put on your Blogger pages?  It started pushing a cookie.  And all BlogSpot pages started pushing a cookie.  Err, how many cookies do we need exactly, Google?

get Firefox-ized

I'm pretty sure today is the day that http://www.getfirefox.com/ will start serving up the release version 1.5 of Firefox.  Slashdot Firefox Plans Mass Marketing Drive /.

Web browser extension developers, you've checked all your extensions to make sure they will work in v1.5, right?

The Shifted Librarian enthuses today about the AADL catalog search plugin.
I will mention that I added that plugin to the ever-growing list of library search plugins at LibSuccess Web Browser Extensions on, well...

21:55, 20 Jul 2005 Scilib (→Library and Academic Search Plugins - added AADL)

So please swing by the LibSuccess wiki and see if you discover anything new, or have any (library-related only please) extensions to add.

UPDATE: Firefox 1.5 is now live for download.  Also, Google AdSense has added Firefox Referrals for international customers (it was previously US-only).  You only get a buck if you convert a Windows user though: "A Firefox referral is counted when a Windows user, who has not previously installed Firefox, downloads and runs the program for the first time."  Their help system says "When a user you’ve referred to Firefox plus Google Toolbar runs Firefox for the first time, you’ll receive up to $1 in your account, depending on the user’s location."

Firefox Scholar

The Educated Browser: SmartFox, the Scholar's Web Browser

While many libraries and museums have put materials online, often at great expense, scholars and researchers using these institutions' online catalogs, collections, and documents currently have no easy or powerful way to use these resources

...

SmartFox will enable users, with a single click, to grab a citation to a book, journal article, archival document, or museum object and store it in their browser. Researchers will then be able to take notes on the reference, link that reference to others...

SmartFox is being developed by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

from Firefox Scholar (aka SmartFox)
via Open Access News

Sounds good to me.  Make it so.

Incidentally, the SmartFox project is from the echo (exploring and collecting history online) site, it's one of the items in their CHNM Tools Center wiki

This is a Wiki that we've put together to build a collaborative resource spanning any and all tools that might be applicable to the practice of online history.

Speaking of wikis, I have added Firefox Scholar to LibSuccess: Web Browser Extensions.

(Grease)Monkeywrenching the Library

Lorcan Dempsey points out that the Access 2005 presentation (Grease)Monkeywrenching the Library: utilizing the sloppy underbelly of the web to expose our collections and services is available.

I call this "live where your users are".
You can find CISTI's experiments in this area at CISTI Lab,
and more information about how to get started at Library Success: Web Browser Extensions.

I presented for 15 minutes on this topic at Internet Librarian International 2005, but I didn't get to a key point that I wanted to make: you can use browser extensions to transform page content.  Want your resources highlighted in Google Scholar search results?  Want an icon next to things available from your library to appear on a page from somewhere else?  All of this is possible.

Firefox SessionSaver - keep on ticking

SessionSaver restores your browser -exactly- as you left it, every startup, every time. Not even a crash will phase [sic] it. Windows, tabs, even things you were typing -- they're all saved. Use the menu to add + remove sessions; right, shift, or middle-clicking will delete. "Simple mode" for peace of mind, or "Expert mode" for advanced flexibility. Just Click. Install. Rad.

Added TextSaver: everything you type, saved (even in frames). Added RemoteSync: session-syncing between browsers (syncs Adblock, too). Added intelligent postData-restore. Added various patches + bugfixes, per discussion in the official support thread.

via Slashdot Favorite Firefox Extensions? /.

LibX Firefox Extension Framework for Libraries

This is great to see: a framework with all the pieces you need to build Firefox extensions for your own libraries.

LibX - Firefox Extension for Libraries

Ongoing  We are currently looking for libraries that are interested in adapting, evaluating and possibly deploying LibX.  Librarians: if your library uses Millenium, Horizon, or Voyager, getting your own edition of LibX can take as little as 15 mins, and we are willing to help you set it up.  We will add other OPACs as there is interest.

LibX was created by Annette Bailey and Godmar Back.
I think this is a great development.

via LibSuccess - Web Browser Extensions

ILI2005 - presentation - Web Browser Extensions

I did the presentation using live changes to Firefox using extensions from the Internet, which has its pluses and minuses.  I didn't want to do recorded/screencasted because that approach can make things look too smooth and easy, in my opinion.  Some things worked, some things didn't.  Most of the information is in the Web Browser Extensions wiki page (which you are welcome to contribute to).  Here's the presentation itself.

Download how_to_enhance_access_with_browser_extensions.ppt

The main points not on the slides:
- to start providing web browser extensions the main skill sets are HTML and JavaScript
- if you want to create advanced Firefox extensions like toolbars and sidebars you also need to learn the Firefox XUL language
- advanced extensions are still fairly beta, there are dependencies on Firefox versions,

If you're deploying extensions you do have some ability to push out new versions automatically.
If you're just doing search plugins, or bookmarklets, you don't have that ability.

There are definitely challenges in terms of user deployment, you might start out deploying to library workstations.

In order to create you may need a collaboration between the IT and library groups, as there is some coding required, however you don't necessarily need a strong coding background to create simple extensions.

CISTI has a beta site called CISTI Lab which has some of our extensions.
Probably there are things that aren't working, so please let me know if you encounter problems.

at ILI2005 in London

I'm at Internet Librarian International, I've posted some more links and info on the ILI2005 wiki/blog.

Presentation links are going up when I can find them.

I will be speaking about web browser extensions this afternoon, with a particular focus on Firefox extensions.

Internet Librarian International 2005

In one week I will be at Internet Librarian International 2005 - Transcending Boundaries:
Information Technologies & Strategies for the 21st Century.
(UPDATE: Just to be clear, this is the UK version of the conference, held in London, England.)

I will be doing a 15 minute presentation on Monday October 10, 15:15-15:30
Session C104 – How to Enhance Access with Browser Extensions in
Track C: Global Best Practices.

As reference I will be using the LibSuccess Wiki page on Web Browser Extensions for Libraries that Gianluca Drago and I have put together (along with others - please don't hestitate to contribute).

My colleague from CISTI, Glen Newton, will be presenting with Brian Kelly on Tuesday October 11, 13:45 – 14:45
Session B203 – Using Open Standards and Open Source Software in
Track B (afternoon): Technology for Libraries.

I have created an unofficial wiki for the conference at
http://ili2005.xwiki.com/
You can also blog there if you want by entering a title in the "Add a Blog Entry" box in the left-hand side column, keep in mind that you need to use XWiki syntax within the blog portion as well.
So far, the participation level in this wiki has been very low, I will be interested to see whether there are actually very many additions.  It is additional overhead to run an open wiki due to the need to clean up any spam and defacement.

You can read more about the features I have added to the wiki in my previous posting.

I will probably be raw-blogging the conference here under category/tag ILI2005.
I may post summaries to the wiki.

I have pulled some placemarks for Google Earth from searches:
Download CopthorneTaraHotel-London.kmz
Download HighStreetKensingtonStation-London.kmz
As you can see, Google Earth has good searching for UK info, so you can just e.g. enter a hotel name or tube station while zoomed in on London and it should be able to find it.

I found the Google Earth view to be useful for my previous trip to Copenhagen, but mainly in terms of the relative positions of things.  I found it hard to get a good sense of the size of things - I couldn't tell whether the buildings and streets I had printed out in order to locate the conference venue were huge buildings separated by wide streets, or small buildings separated by alleyways.

You may find the Google Earth view a bit more helpful if you go into the roads layer and turn on UK Roads.

copy as plain text for Firefox

Sometimes our technology is a little too helpful.  I fight endless battles with Word trying to undo some formatting it has gotten when I pasted something in from a web page.

The little Firefox Copy Plain Text extension fixes this, adding a simple "Copy as Plain Text" option to the right-click menu.

recommender systems

I've noticed some buzz around recommender systems.
Personally I'd like it if my blog was smart enough to automatically link to my own similar postings.

LibraryClips had a couple postings:
Related by RSS
Related articles

It seems that Waypath can provide its guess at related postings and related Amazon books (Waypath Related Stuff).
You can do this with plugin modules for various blogging platforms, or as a bookmarklet, or you could get an RSS feed and turn it into HTML.

I'm going to use my previous environmental scanning posting as an example.

http://www.waypath.com/query?type=url&x=0&y=0&key=http%3A//scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/2005/07/environmental_s.html

You can get best match by putting &mode=best at the end

http://rss.waypath.com/query.xml?url=http%3A%2F%2Fscilib.typepad.com%2Fscience_library_pad%2F2005%2F07%2Fenvironmental_s.html&mode=best

or most recent matches with &hours=24&mode=new

http://rss.waypath.com/query.xml?url=http%3A%2F%2Fscilib.typepad.com%2Fscience_library_pad%2F2005%2F07%2Fenvironmental_s.html&hours=24&mode=new

I can't figure out how to do "find all posts that reference this SITE" though.

Findory also provides its own related postings guesses, on a per-site basis.

Here's a page with code to see related postings inline

http://findory.com/inline/source?source=Science%20Library%20Pad&ib=1

You can also get it as an RSS feed

http://rss.findory.com/rss/Blogs/?ras=Science%20Library%20Pad

You can embed the Yahoo Y!Q related-content search into your site.  Or you can use one of the Y!Q Firefox extensions as you browse.

The frassle environment also can provide other people's categories that are related to yours.  Via Shimon Rura's blog posting Blogs and Libraries.

Jon Udell has been doing thinking about how to find postings related to your interests: More delicious collaborative filtering.

You really should be able to have a visual navigation environment:
- find me all postings that link to this one
- find me everyone who has bookmarked / categorized this post
- find me closely related postings
- show me postings related to those postings (and so on...)
- position this posting in a web "discussion thread", if applicable (e.g. this posting refers to posting X, and is then referred to by posting Y)

Any other ways to integrate recommender systems with your website or as you browse?

previously:
2005-Feb-04  Yahoo Y!Q contextual searching

info about web browser extensions wikified

Since I'm going to be giving a presentation on web browser extensions for libraries, I should have some good resources for y'all.  Fortunately Gianluca Drago already beat me to it by building an extensive page, that runs on a home machine.

I proposed and Gianluca agreed to move this content to a more permanent wiki home where everyone can contribute to extending it.  I have started moving some of the links over to

Lib Success Wiki - Technology - Web Browser Extensions

Please feel free to add to that page.

Del.icio.us Toolbar for Firefox

The guys at del.icio.us have launched a “very preliminary del.icio.us firefox toolbar at http://del.icio.us/toolbar/

via loose wire: The Firefox Del.icio.us Toolbar.