Owen Stephens, inspired by Mashed Museum, is proposing Mashed Libraries UK 2008.
the idea is to have a reasonably informal event at which we try to do interesting stuff with library technology and/or data
He's put together a starting list of possible APIs... there must be many more that people could add or offer...
Services/APIs/Systems/Technology/Data that we could use
via Twitter
Through an unexpected series of events I find myself going to Open Repositories 2008
The lineup looks great including a keynote from Peter Murray-Rust, and two (!) sessions on Scientific Repositories.
There is also a Repository Challenge for developers with a £2,500 prize, which is like a million US dollars now (finally, Canadians get to make US dollar jokes). Kudos to David Flanders for leading this "let's just build stuff and see what works" approach.
I will be blogging under tag/category or08, and twittering under hashtag #or08
I made an Upcoming event, mainly because then if you add the machine tag
upcoming:event=455039
to your Flickr photos, it will automatically put in a nice "Taken at Open Repositories 2008" logo.
The [National Library of Australia] has recently opened this "Library Labs" wiki space:
https://wiki.nla.gov.au/display/LABS/Home
The aim of this space is to let our colleagues know what we are doing, to invite comments, questions and feedback and to provide a space for discussion and collaboration.
We have started to redevelop our digital library services using a service-oriented architecture and open source software solutions where these are functional and robust. We are also aiming to take a common ("single business") approach to collection management, discovery and delivery.
We are interested in forming a community of Australian business analysts and developers who are working on similar problems and who are interested in interoperable, standards-based solutions. We are also interested in working with colleagues at an international level to provide prototypes and testbeds for new and emerging standards.
via Warwick Cathro
Assistant Director-General, Innovation
National Library of Australia
The Google Book Search Book Viewability API enables developers to:
- Link to Books in Google Book Search using ISBNs, LCCNs, and OCLC numbers
- Know whether Google Book Search has a specific title and what the viewability of that title is
- Generate links to a thumbnail of the cover of a book
- Generate links to an informational page about a book
- Generate links to a preview of a book
http://code.google.com/apis/books/
via LibraryThing blog - Google Books in LibraryThing - March 13, 2008
We need APIs everywhere for everything.
AIR is intended to help software developers create applications that exist in part on a user’s PC or smartphone and in part on servers reachable through the Internet.
To computer users, the applications will look like any others on their device, represented by an icon. The AIR applications can mimic the functions of a Web browser but do not require a Web browser to run.
...
“There is a big cloud movement that is building an infrastructure that speaks directly to this kind of software and experience,” said Sean M. Maloney, Intel’s executive vice president.
New York Times - Adobe Blurs Line Between PC and Web - February 25, 2008
AIR has graduated from Adobe Labs, and is now available for free download at
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/
I have to say, I'm not really clear how this is any different from, or better than, Java.
I guess the argument is that it uses web standardsy stuff, so it's easier to program than Java.
Plus it's all well and good to say cloud this and cloud that, for example, but I don't see any indication that AIR provides you with some storage cloud from Adobe that you can use.
I found a posting by a GWT developer that briefly introduces the major competing technologies in this space
Adobe AIR/Apollo vs Ajax vs Gears vs Flash vs Silverlight vs JavaFX vs GWT - June 11, 2007
As well I wonder about the implications for searching. Our search engines mostly eat text or things that can be converted easily to plain text (Word documents, PDFs, PowerPoints). You can do a whole fancy site in Flash and to a search engine it will barely exist. If we move from building text-based web sites to interaction based web apps, how will we ever be able to find anything again?
Location: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Date: October 1-4, 2008 (Hackfest: Oct 1; Conference: Oct 2-4)
CFP Deadline: Friday, February 22, 2008
URL: http://access2008.mcmaster.ca
Access is Canada's premier library technology conference, featuring a single stream of sessions that deal with technology planning, development, challenges and solutions. ... now accepting proposals for prepared talks on the following topics (other ideas are more than welcome):
- customized web applications and search interfaces
- open source software
- national and provincial/state-wide consortia technology initiatives
- information policy
- digital and social media
- library catalogue innovations
- digitization projects
- institutional repositories
- end-user searching behaviours
- protocols and metadata
...or anything else suitably geeky, innovative and/or awe-inspiring
Previously:
Access2005 Access2006 Access2007
It was great to talk with various enterprise/IT/technology architects at DLF Fall Forum 2007 about our various ideas an approaches to modeling and implementing the new library technology infrastructure. But it's clear there are still more library technology architects out there (even if they may not have that in their job title), I ran across an interesting blog posting by Jonathan Rochkind:
Notes on future directions of Library Systems from Bibliographic Wilderness blog, September 28, 2007
Here are some notes on near/medium future directions of the library systems environment/architecture, and a sketch of requirements on where we want to go. These notes may or may not end up as part of an internal white paper here, as we analyze where we want to be headed (something good to do anyway, but we got a kick in the pants when the vendor ended development on our current ILS).
...
The library systems environment has grown from being composed of a single “Integrated Library System” at the origin of library systems in the 1980s, to being composed of an ‘ecology’ of systems in most libraries today. These different systems could be from various sources (proprietary and open source), fulfill various–both overlapping and distinct–functions, are used in various ways by different subsets of users (both library staff and our end-users), and interact with each other to varying degrees (some well, some poorly).
I wonder if I should consider adding a "library technology architecture" category to SLP?
PS Jonathan was at DLF but we didn't formally meet, it's odd how sometimes virtual connection and discovery is easier than in the physical world.
The last three weeks I’ve been thinking a great deal about the role of my department in fulfilling the Libraries mission and where the department needs to go in the next 3 years. Part of getting where we want to go has been this whole site redesign process. But not in the way most of the library thinks.
...
Long term I’d like a site which has a series of web services that can be exploited by my developers but also my the university web developers and who knows who else.
...
For faculty and grad students who want to do known item searching in our catalog, maybe something like LibX is the way to go. Or maybe allowing users to create their own search interface to a set of particular resources that they can embed in their browsers search bar or on their desktop as a search widget.
Ultimately, I feel like it is these kinds of services that will make of break a library’s virtual presence not the library website.
Library Web Chic - The future of Web Services isn’t the Library website - September 16, 2007
Err, ditto.
Previously:
July 16, 2007 Library Journal netConnect - Web Services and the Social Catalogue
I must admit that even though there were a remarkable number of famous and extremely accomplished people at SciFoo, I had the benefit of not knowing who most of them were. You might think this is a rather odd perspective, not least of which because I'm usually the last person to laud the benefits of being ill-informed, but it made it much easier to sit across from Eva Vertes and have a conversation without knowing in advance that she's a super-genius cancer researcher.
Anyhoo, I found this profile of Charles Simonyi in Technology Review interesting, I didn't know about his foundational involvement with Microsoft Office, and his new project to create a new type of programming environment, intentional software. It might have been interesting to hear a question like "how was it like going back to Russia to train for your spaceflight after having left Hungary all those many years ago" rather than some the questions that were asked (e.g. "how does it smell in space").
Librarian in Black responded to my article in Library Journal netConnect, and Richard Wallis' commentary thereon. She says
What makes me sad is that both Ackerman [sic] and Wallis have missed a key point: if the future is in web services, how can libraries take advantage of that with their current staff configurations? How many libraries in the U.S. have a honest-to-goodness computer programmer on staff? How many have staff with Computer Science degrees? How many staff do they have devoted to the library's hardware, software, and network? How many staff do they have devoted to web services?
In the smallest libraries, perhaps all of these are the same one person.
My article is about modern software engineering for libraries, not on how to staff them. However, in the very same issue of netConnect there's an article by Karen Coombs "Digital Promise and Peril" calling for library staffing to reflect the digital content environment
Many of these digital materials are in jeopardy of being lost because librarians have not yet found adequate ways to collect and manage them. In part, this is because roles and skill sets have been siloed in libraries. Materials preservation issues have typically been the purview of special collections and archives units within the library. In contrast, cataloging expertise has resided in technical services, and technology expertise has typically resided in systems. To collect and manage born digital objects adequately requires these roles and skill sets to come together.
So let me summarize some of the goals and targets of the article, as well as talk about the relationship to promising developments:
Where can we look?
Maybe the DLF project on ILS APIs will help.
Maybe the OASIS effort on standardising search services will be useful.
Maybe it happens by using OpenSearch and simple REST interfaces rather than custom library protocols.
UPDATE: There is another important piece, which is about libraries reaching out and speaking the right language. That's why you need to understand how to express things in terms of SOA, Web Services, and APIs. There is way more innovation capacity outside your walls than you can ever get inside, even if you have the perfect IT staffing policy and budget. From your local superpatrons, highschool CS students, and local college and university computer science departments, to, basically, every CS student in the entire world. You can reach them with contests, with collaboration requests, with invitations to improve your systems... but here's the important part... if you speak their language. CS people love challenges and programming, but they're not going to learn obscure library jargon and usage like OPAC, Z39.50 and database (which means something completely different in CS). You can't say "hey, can you help us improve our OPAC because the Z39.50 doesn't federate across our databases". They're not going to know what the f*** you're asking. Learn the CS language, and a whole world of programmers will open up to you.
To me one of the single biggest missed opportunities is in the digital library community. Ever year, lots of computer science groups, flush with energetic grad students, toil away and produce results that are presented at JCDL and ECDL. And, based on my experience at ECDL 2006, they then present those results entirely to a community of other computer scientists. Where are the librarians? Why are you all at library conferences talking to other librarians? Come to *CDL and ask the computer scientists to build stuff you need. Yes, it's a difficult transition from research to production, but at least join the conversation. ENDUPDATE
I don't have the answers and I have certainly asked again and again where people see all these frameworks and groups fitting together, with no response.
The good news is that there are lots of projects out there already - I don't think it's a case that there is no activity. The fundamental point of my article is that for these projects, we have to use enterprise architecture, service-oriented architecture, web services / standard APIs and the whole toolkit of modern network-based standard-data software development. Because if we don't, WE WILL BUILD SILO SYSTEMS AGAIN.
That's what I said in my IATUL presentation, and in the short accompanying paper (Scribd), and what I've been saying over and over again in this blog.
[Sidebar on Scribd: be careful browsing around this document hosting site. Many of the profiles, profile images, and documents are unfortunately very not safe for work. Scribd really needs to put in a moderation / adult content filtering system.]
Why do I think it's important to talk about these topics? Because there really are lots of new developments in the library catalogue and OPAC world, including:
There are also some great modular browser tools out there, including
I'm very much hoping that these developments will open libraries up to be better network participants, with a broader community of developers able to build pieces, and with standards enabling libraries with limited development capability to simply plug-and-play.
Some links via The Ten Thousand Year Blog: eXtensible Catalog open source project, VuFind released as open source software.
Previously:
June 29, 2007 Casey Bisson on Scriblio and OpenLibrary
Library Journal netConnect for July is out (July 15, 2007). The cover theme is the "Social Catalogue". All of the content is free online as usual.
On this theme are an article I wrote about Library Web Services, advocacy by John Blyberg about the need for open APIs ("Always Pushing Information"), and an explanation of one way to Visualize Your Catalog using Grokker, by Kate Bouman et al.
I want to thank Jay Datema for this opportunity to share these concepts with a wider audience, and in particular for his patience during the extremely long genesis of my article.
I do want to add some supplementary information.
"web services also refers to one specific technology implementation" - by this I mean the industry Web Services stack, SOAP-based services. This shouldn't be confused with SOA, Service-Oriented Architecture, which is a conceptual framework. There is a short version of my sidebar on SOA in the article, but with Jay's permission, the full original version is attached below.
I did a set of supplementary bookmarks for the article, but somewhere along the line I forgot to include them in the article itself, anyway, they're available at
http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/ljwebservices
UPDATE: As it happens, Jon Udell blogged a plea today for the most basic of catalogue interfaces, a standard ISBN syntax in the URL. Via panlibus. ENDUPDATE
I will also try to finish the blog posting of a long-overdue review of the 4 SOA / Web Services books I recommended at the end of the article.
You can of course read more as well in my (sometimes overlapping) blog categories on Service-Oriented Architecture and Web Services.
As well, Peter Murray has been advocating for library SOA, and has set up an aggregator to gather various blog postings on the topic:
Finally, here's the full sidebar that I wrote:
Library SOA
In the library world, we are often bombarded with new technology terms and ideas.
In this article, I will discuss Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services, providing a framework for understanding their differences and complementary nature.
In this way, it should become evident which aspects will be of enduring value, and which will change as technology evolves.
Often SOA and Web Services are used interchangeably but they are actually quite different. SOA is a methodology for software architecture and for guiding software development. The library technology landscape is littered with towering monoliths of software and teetering siloed systems. We shouldn't feel too bad about this: when catalogues and digital libraries were being developed, these were reasonable implementations. It is only as the software engineering field has evolved that we have realized the problems caused by developing closed, inflexible systems.
SOA is a way of thinking about software, of breaking it down into appropriately-sized component parts, and minimizing the dependencies between those parts. It also helps to guide your thinking by emphasizing reusability. Having reusability as a core consideration reminds the developers that their code is not ephemeral - it will almost certainly be around for a long time, which means that it is critical to make it maintainable and extendable.
Web Services are a technology that can be used to implement a Service-Oriented Architecture. They have some characteristics that mesh well with the requirements of an SOA. But Web Services are just the latest technology to come, and are sure to be replaced or added to by future developments. As well, there is a potential danger of complexity creep, as more and more WS-* standards are developed.
So the important thing is to take the concept of Web Services, that of providing a well-defined interface, an API that exposes useful capabilities or data from within your organization, and select a technology as appropriate. This may be full Web Services with SOAP, it may be a simple HTTP REST interface, or both, or neither. It’s the idea that’s important, not the particular technology. In fact, what is a service, within an SOA? It’s simply a bundle of functionality with a well-defined interface.
When developing software, regardless of methodology or technology, it is important is to have the concept of sustainability in mind. There is a balance of course between long-term benefits and short-term gain. Many will argue that too much design or planning interferes with organizational agility, that it is better to rapidly deploy something, than to tilt against the windmill of perfectly engineered software.
But the fact that we now have OPAC 2.0 and “new ILS” initiatives tells us that we need to learn the lesson of sustainable software. To put it bluntly: with the library catalogue, we slowly built a software system that no longer meets all of our needs. With mashups and quickly hacked APIs, we run the risk of rapidly building software systems that will not be able to meet our needs.
Service-Oriented Architecture is the latest, and by no means perfect, method of addressing enduring challenges of software design. It is a new way of describing and communicating the concepts behind the software you build; a way of maintaining the essential conceptual integrity needed to successfully build sustainable computer systems.
SOA is a framework that sits above the development process itself. SOA does not require a waterfall model of development. We know a failed approach is trying to do all the design up front and then, perhaps after substantial time has passed in the design phase, writing the code. In fact, I believe the best results will be obtained by iterating the architecture, that is, continuously refining the framework by going back and forth between implementing defined services, and updating service definitions based on the results. I think it is important to remember that modern software engineering is about the development of software as a conversation between design and implementation, not a one-way street.
Like any methodology, there is a risk that SOA can lead to an excess of complexity, and to trying to over determine requirements that may change quickly. Be wary of elaborate SOA processes that are better matched to giant Fortune 500 companies than to the needs of basic library systems. But with all those caveats in mind, the core of SOA is quite simple: define what functions the business wants to perform, and then break those functions down into the smallest useful pieces.
This is the concept of service granularity: identify services that are large enough to provide substantial useful functionality, without being so large that they are in danger of becoming new silos. As luck would have it, we already have a fairly good idea of basic library functions, as defined by our current catalogues. We first need to break those services out of the ILS silos, and then look at adding new capabilities beyond what the ILS could offer.
There is a possibility for us to all escape the isolation of our OPAC islands, by working together to create common library service definitions, so that we move beyond the catalogue and are interoperable right from the start. I believe this is a tremendous opportunity for the library community, because standard services are the very foundations upon which innovation is built. We look to Amazon and want to capture some of the software development energy that builds upon Amazon’s services, but we have to realize that behind the scenes, Amazon has an internal SOA that helps to guide and sustain its service framework.
SOA is, in a way, like infrastructure. We benefit enormously from the fact that electrical, water, and other services in buildings are standardized, with uniform interfaces and attributes. I don’t think many people would want to work in an environment of “agile electricity”, where every wall socket had a different interface and electrical characteristics. That basic foundation of standards is what SOA can provide to the library world.
We all know that there are successful standards efforts, and there are those that languish. This is the moment, as libraries are starting to explore the world of Web Services, for us to work together as organizations to put in place the infrastructure, the simple set of basic standards, the library Service-Oriented Architecture that will form a platform for sustainable innovation for years to come.
Why do you want to have an ecosystem of services?
So that developers can do stuff like this.
Yahoo Real Estate's new Home Values page. Launched this morning, the new page combines three APIs available right here on the Developer Network with two more from Zillow, to provide a 360-degree view of what homes are worth in the neighborhood of your choice.
Yahoo! APIs In Use:
* AJAX Maps - finds the home you're searching for, recently sold comparables, and nearby similar homes for sale.
* Local Search - finds and displays local appraisers and customer ratings.
* Answers Question Search - finds and displays questions and answers for the query "home value."Zillow APIs In Use:
* GetDeepSearchResults - finds valuations, home data, sales and tax records.
* GetDeepComps - gets data on comparable homes in the area.
Covers homes in USA only.
I get the sense that Daniel Chudnov and I are talking about similar problems from different angles.
I'm talking about how to get from ideas to more standard (network) services for libraries to expose and consume, he's talking about how to ensure that all available services get jammed everywhere in a user's environment.
One Big Library - NASIG 2007 talk: A New Approach to Service Discovery and Resource Delivery
Everybody's gone mashin', mashin's A-OK.
On the heels of Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly, comes Google's Mashup Editor, complete with a blog and a site to host your creations
The Google Mashup Editor's simple online interface enables you to build, test, deploy and distribute your mashup.Using familiar technologies like HTML, JavaScript and CSS, you can create mashups in minutes and test them in our sandbox, a testing ground for your mashup.
You can also take advantage of a few of our extended XML tags so that you can reuse some standard AJAX UI components -- things like editable lists, Google Maps, Date Pickers, Calendars, and ratings controls -- with one line of code. These UI elements operate on feeds and can be reused in any application
Once you've created your mashup, you can publish it using Google's infrastructure and we'll serve it for you on the subdomain googlemashups.com. You don't need to set up a server and hosting, or a database or authentication for your users -- we do it all for you. You concentrate on the user experience of your app, and we'll make sure people can access it. You can even test a new version of your application while the current one is running. Once you're ready, you can publish it with one click of a button to get your site up and live.
via Mashups made easy
via ResourceShelf
Note: it's currently in limited release, you'll have to sign up on a waiting list.
Previously:
March 2, 2007 mashup platforms and SOA
The ELPUB 2007 and IATUL 2007 programmes are up. Both will feature topics in the areas of open access and scholarly communication. It's interesting to me how much the technology and interests of the scholarly publishing community and the academic library community seem to be converging.
At ELPUB 2007, CISTI's Judy Best will be presenting
Jason Kelly contacted me and informed me that there are two technical positions open for your wetware at OpenWetware, one's called senior tech developer, the other senior knowledge developer
http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Hiring
Perhaps of interest to those of you who bridge the boundary between librarianship and developer.
Previously:
December 20, 2005 OpenWetWare, biological research sharing wiki
Yes, I can relate anything to SOA.
I was thinking about the experience that Steve and I had with Second Life, which is, we went in, we wandered around, but we couldn't quite figure out what it was for. There was no game. There was nothing to do. We were homeless and impoverished. (Well, I was impoverished. Steve has six dollars.)
I think the answer is that it was the wrong question.
Second Life is platform, not narrative.
We were tripped up by assumptions, based on our previous experiences and background. Computer Science people of my generation are used to being outside of programming environments. In Google Sketchup, you also create 3D objects, but you don't create them from inside of a virtual environment, you create them from the outside, Godlike view.
Second Life is like the blinking cursor on a Commodore 64 screen. READY, it says, and you don't say "what is the narrative" you say "what can I do with this?" Second Life is like the Tron version of the C64, where you're inside the computer looking out. The fact that you're inside the SL environment is what threw my thinking askew. I'm used to programming environments where you're outside, looking in. In my lifetime, rich visual interaction (well, as rich as was possible on the technology of the moment) has been mainly used for games.
Second Life is a hammer and nails, not a book. You don't ask "what's the narrative of a hammer?" Our difficulty with SL was contrasted with our immediate understanding of World of Warcraft. WoW meets our assumptions, in that it fits into one of the visual game assumption slots, the "Dungeons and Dragons on a computer" one. There are only a few types of computer games really. I won't list them all, but here's resource management like in Civilization, there's first-person shooter like Doom, there's abstract shooter like Asteroids, these are all narratives that long-time computer users of my generation understand immediately.
Second Life is not a book, it's a World Processor. It's interesting that we didn't immediately perceive Second Life as a command-line prompt, because that certainly would have made things clearer. I don't expect any narrative from the prompt of my terminal application.
![[terminal]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/133/338583935_c0baebd7a3_o.jpg)
There is actually a whole set of relationships to command prompts that I think is interesting to explore. (And yes, we are getting to SOA eventually.)
David Brin got a lot of attention in the CS community with his article Why Johnny can't code, and certainly those of us from the TRS-80 / Commodore 64 / Apple II era have been wondering how kids get into computer programming these days, without that flashing prompt of the BASIC programming language. I had been speculating that "the new coding" was designing levels using game editors (many of the Doom / Unreal type games include editors to create new game environments). Second Life would be a natural extension of this. So maybe "Johnny doesn't code, he creates in SL?"
The path for my generation of programmers looks quite different. Flashing READY prompt. Then maybe an Adventure game (text-based). They're related in a twisted way. Most of the adventure games suffered from a limited and extremely specific vocabulary, which turns out to be the same "suffering" that a computer programming language has. As we were decoding the syntax of C64 commands and lines of BASIC, we were typing stuff into adventure games like
"open the golden cage"
UNKNOWN
"unlock the gilded cage"
CAN'T PARSE THAT
"use heavy hammer on cage"
UNRECOGNIZED OBJECT "ON CAGE"
"get the ^%$^ bird out of the *%&^&*^% cage!!!"
and so on
Eventually that led to MUDs, and MUDs are a clear lineal antecedent of Second Life. In MUDs you could also create objects and do programming. However, I think few people embraced the platform aspect of MUDs, most people used the narrative of the D&D type quest game. Second Life is sort of like a MUD without the game built yet.
This difficulty between the abstraction of an empty platform and the immediate understanding of
a narrative is evident to me when I talk to librarians and others about SOA (you see I told you I was getting here eventually). They always say "that's nice, but give me concrete examples". In the context of this posting, I guess I would say, "Web Services are a hammer, not a book, and SOA is the architecture of the house you could build with that hammer".
In a similar way, this illustrates some of the challenges between the catalogue and the idea of a general open library technology platform. The catalogue has narrative. I would argue it's the wrong narrative, with concepts mis-adapted from the traditional librarian-card catalogue-patron world of paper, but it is as least something one can grasp.
The attraction of narrative is probably one of the reasons that Steve and I have been spending way too many hours in WoW, while our visits to SL usually last about five minutes.
![[r yellowjacket]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/137/338618237_7025e83095_o.jpg)
![[henge]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/158/338661302_aabfcbacd0_o.jpg)
In my next posting, I will talk more about how assumptions can create challenges and barriers, specifically about how extending analogue library paper world assumptions to digital can lead to incorrect conclusions.
The Auditor General of Canada, 2006 Report, Chapter 3 — Large Information Technology Projects.
# Overall, the government has made limited progress since our last audit of IT projects in 1997. Although since 1998 the Treasury Board Secretariat has established a framework of best practices for managing IT projects, many of the problems we cited in past reports have persisted.
# The quality of governance varied widely from project to project. In four of the seven projects we found that governance responsibilities were not carried out adequately because key issues that impacted project performance were either not reported or not resolved.
# Five of the seven projects we looked at were allowed to proceed with a business case that was incomplete or out-of-date or contained information that could not be supported.
# Four of the projects were undertaken by departments that lacked the appropriate skills and experience to manage the projects or the capacity to use the system to improve the way they deliver their programs.
# Depending on the project, the quality of project management ranged from good to seriously flawed. In two cases, poor project management led to long delays and large cost overruns.
There is an opportunity for the library and scholarly community to work with the various word processor builders to get to some common standards.
The main players that I'm aware of being Word 2007 and OpenOffice.
Jennifer Michelstein of Microsoft has the (mis)fortune of starting her MS blogging career with the posting [Word 2007] Academic features: citation & bibliography tools.
There's some nice stuff, but I have two concerns:
1. The focus is on building your Master List inside of Word. Yes, you can share lists, but I don't want Word to be the citation master at all
Once a source is created, it lives in two places: your Master List and your Current List. The Master List is the database of all sources ever created. The Current List includes all of the sources that will be used in the current document.
The purpose of the Master List is to save you from re-typing and re-entering information about sources that you commonly use. For example, if you are a Shakespeare scholar and always cite the same five Shakespearean references, you can just select these sources in your Master List and click Copy to add them to your Current List. Now you can cite them throughout your document.
Maybe Connotea is my "master list", or EndNote, or Bookends. You know, separation of concerns? Let my bibliographic software be the master of citation management. Make Word the master of communicating with all major citation repositories, whether local on my machine, or out on the web.
2. They will talk to libraries... somehow. With a software development kit (SDK) that doesn't exist yet. Um, how about we get that kit, immediately?
we are building a platform on the Research and Reference pane, to enable connecting to a library database and importing metadata about sources. We’ll publish an SDK so that Microsoft or any 3rd party data provider can build a service that fits nicely into our Bibliography tools. This project is underway, but the functionality isn’t available externally in Beta2. This sounds like a topic better handled in its own post.
darcusblog (Bruce D'Arcus, of the OpenOffice Bibliographic Project) has written extensively (and critically) about the current state of the art in citation management in Word 2007
via Dan on eScience
The contest challenge is to use an OCLC resource to create a Web service that does something interesting, innovative, and useful to libraries.
The deadline for entry is midnight [Eastern Daylight Time], 15 September 2006.
Second OCLC Research Software Contest
via OCLC Research Announcements
via Digital Library related RSS news feeds
Previously:
June 05, 2006 Talis Library Mashup Contest
*** 1 Open Repositories 2007 - 2nd International Conference on Open Repositories (ICOR2007)
January 23-26, 2007
San Antonio, Texas
CFP deadline:
October 2, 2006 Extended abstract, less than 500 words, double spaced
via Disruptive Library Technology Jester
*** 2 code4lib 2007
February 28 - March 2, 2007
Athens, Georgia
For all those users of libraries who have ever wished they could bring information from their library to life outside the virtual walls of its web site. For all those librarians who have contemplated enriching their OPAC with maps, reviews, jacket images, or folksonomies. For all of you, and for anyone else who has harboured a yearning to see information from or about libraries put to best use and displayed to best effect alongside information or services from other sources, we bring you the Mashing Up The Library competition.
This is your chance to wow the world with your ideas; your chance to build better systems on top of library data; your chance to demonstrate the value and the power of libraries; your chance to take library information and display it in exciting new ways; and your chance to walk away with £1,000.
Entries are due by Friday 18 August [2006], and we have a first prize of £1,000 and a second prize of £500, both provided by Talis to encourage innovative approaches to library information such as those made possible by APIs from the Talis Platform.
via panlibus
If I'm reading the rules correctly, it looks like any organization can participate.
So... Lorcan, what about the OCLC Contest?Last year's contest page says
Plans call for the OCLC Research Software Contest to become an annual event. Look for announcements of next year's [i.e. 2006] contest sometime around December 2005–January 2006
UPDATE 2006-07-09: Second OCLC Research Software Contest announced.
here is the link to the outputs of the SOA workshop in
Vancouver last month. Go tohttp://educationcommons.org/projects/display/SOA/Home
Click on the Workshop March 2006 link to see all the workshop material. Look for the
16 (or so) "service candidates" we identified as emerging out of the
high-level business process of "apply for admission". We demonstrated the
power of service oriented analysis and the existence of abundant reusable
services at or close to the infrastructure level (though Thomas Erl calls
these "application services"). The MIT/OKI [Open Knowledge Initiative] crowd and UK representative [University of Hull - e-Services Integration] were particularly helpful in working this through.We are starting to piece together some of the next steps and have identified
the following "tracks" going forward:Entity definition
Business process discovery
Application service candidate discovery
Experimental implementation exercises (Proof of Concept)
Data representation architecture and schema definition
Higher education "basic profile" definition
Security and privacy requirements definition
Technology alternatives selection -- should be deferred to Service-Oriented
Analysis stageBy the time we reach CANHEIT, we should have a penultimate version of the
report (feasibility study) funded by the Mellon Foundation. Be sure to
attend the presentation by Richard Spencer and Leo Fernig [A Community Source Student Services System].Ted Dodds
Associate Vice President, Information Technology & CIO
The University of British Columbia
via Bill St. Arnaud - CAnet News - SOA in Higher Education
Previously:
January 05, 2005 Hull.ac.uk portal built using SOA
If your organization has been trying to find a way to get some neat code developed, the Google Summer of Code 2006 may help.
5. What are the eligibility requirements for mentor organizations?
Mentor organizations must be organizations or individuals running an active and viable open source or free software project whose applications are approved by Google's Open Source Program Office. ...
15. How are payments structured?Google will provide a stipend of 5000 USD per student developer, of which 4500 USD goes to the accepted student applicant and 500 USD to the mentoring organization upon successful completion of a project. Students will be paid 500 USD upon acceptance of their application to the program, 2000 USD mid-program provided sufficient progress has been made on their project, and 2000 USD at close of program provided their project has been completed.
from Summer of Code: Mentor FAQ
as seen on Slashdot Summer of Code 2006 is On /.
The bibliographic project will design and build an easy to use and comprehensive bibliographic facility within OpenOffice. It will be easy to use for the casual user, but will meet all the requirements of the professional and academic writer. The new bibliographic facility will utilise the latest open standards and will make the fullest use of emerging XML, XSLT, RDF and SRU/W technology.
http://bibliographic.openoffice.org/
I think this might be a promising central point for collaboration in the area of bibliographic integration with software. Since you need the citation information in your document composition environment, why not just build bibliographic capabilities right in?
UPDATE
Bruce D'Arcus of the Geography Department of Miami University is the co-project leader. He has a blog.
A couple interesting postings from his blog:
His blog leads me to discover there is a HubMed Blog - Hublog, with a posting from December 17, 2005 Academic Metadata Workflow.
ENDUPDATE
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