Science Library Pad

Slashdot bookmarks and tags

Slashdot has a bookmarking and tagging system, but it's a bit awkward.
Once logged in, you can bookmark manually at

http://slashdot.org/bookmark.pl

They also have bookmarklets to do the same thing.
You can add tags, but onewordonly, no "multiple word" tags.
To edit a bookmark, the only way I could find was to go to Bookmarks->Recent and click on the "bookmark" link next to the one you want to change.

http://slashdot.org/bookmark.pl/?op=showbookmarks&recent=1

You can view your tags at http://slashdot.org/my/tags but you can't actually do anything with them yet.
There is some cross-integration between bookmarks, your journal, and story submission.

You can even get yourself a little "Slashdot Me" badge.

   Slashdot It

There's a FeedFlare to SUBMIT a Slashdot article, but I couldn't find one to bookmark an article, so I just made one.

Download slashdot-bookmark.xml

furl to delicious bookmarks

If you want to take advantage of, and get noticed by, the wise crowds, the challenge is to be where the people are. 

(That is a message that holds for libraries as well.)

Where the people are, as far as I can tell, is mostly looking at the first page of regular Google search results.  But there are some communities.  It's hard to tell what the real ones are though.  Many sites are much bigger in "buzz size" than they are in actual membership.  That being said, there are at least some Usual Suspects:

delicious for bookmarking
Flickr for photos

One of the reasons I think Picasa Web Albums is misguided is that ship has sailed.  Just give up and support Flickr already.

For bookmarking, however, delicious doesn't quite do it for me.  I like Furl better.
But then, I'm not participating in the delicious community conversation.

So I experimented with copying my Furl bookmarks to delicious, here is the result

http://del.icio.us/scilibfurl

I used the Python code furl2delicious.py from Anything Else: Furl to Delicious, with the necessarily modifications from the comments.

Mac OS X comes with Python, so I just ran it at the command line.

Since I have 1561 bookmarks in Furl, with multiple tags, and only 599 made it to delicious, with only one tag each (UPDATE 2006-06-16: And it splits multi-word tags into multiple tags, instead of joining them), I think it is only a moderate success.

A better way to maintain both sets is to get one of those bookmarklets that lets you send your bookmarks to multiple sites at once.  Right now I am trying a bookmarklet built with Site Submission MultiTool - Alan's Marklet Maker.  It brings up both interfaces, with the URL info filled in - about as good as you could do without a lot of custom work I guess.

Technorati Favorites

Technorati has added Favorites, which is a combination of searchable blogroll and RSS reader functionality.  Technorati blog says

There's also a bookmarklet you can take with you, so you can add to your favorites wherever you browse (get it on the Favorites Help page). And if you use another subscription tool or service, you can export your subscriptions and import them using the Favorites Importer!

Once you've got some favorites, you'll see the most recent posts from them, newest to oldest, as they happen. If you prefer RSS, don't worry, it's available.

Got your own blog? Wanna make it easy for Technorati members to mark is as a favorite? Just use one of these handy buttons! You can even display recent posts from your Favorites on your own blog with the Favorites Widget.

But the best part is that now you can search just your favorite blogs. The second tab on every keyword search result is now "Your Favorites" - click it to search just your favorite blogs.

Finally, Technorati Favorites are for sharing! Note that everyone has a public favorites page. You can share yours with your friends with the link at the top of your Favorites page.

Of course, what's in this for Technorati is human-selected sites, as part of the ongoing challenge of ranking blogs and reducing spam.  There is a limit of 50 faves.  I can't be bothered creating Yet Another blogroll so I just added Lorcan's blog as a demo, but anyway, here's http://www.technorati.com/faves/scilib

As mentioned, you can get an "add to TechnoFaves" button for your site, here's one for Science Library Pad:

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

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

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.

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.

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.

library content: from invisible to exhibitionist - SilkWorm

SilkWorm is an initative that I don't completely understand, that has to do with better sharing of library information.  I ran across it in discussion related to Jon Udell's LibraryLookup, and more info has now been posted to Open Access News.

Here's what Jon had to say (May 27, 2005)

This morning I spoke with Richard Wallis, who is the technical development manager for Talis, one of the OPAC (online public access catalog) vendors whose clients' libraries are accessible using LibraryLookup. Talis is one of a handful of OPACs for which I'd built static lists of bookmarklets, based on information I'd gathered from libdex.com. Maintaining those long lists was problematic, though, as maintaining long lists always is. So last month I deprecated them in favor of the bookmarklet generator.

In theory, that meant I only needed to maintain a short list of rules, which are just URL patterns. Using these, folks could plug in the domain names of their OPACs and create bookmarklets on the fly.

In practice, of course, there are always exceptions to rules. By adding parameters to the URL patterns I was able to handle some of the exceptions, but that made things more complicated for folks using the bookmarklet generator.

So I was delighted to learn that Talis now offers a service that hides that complexity behind a simple interface.

On panlibus, we find LibraryLookup Generator Using SilkWorm Directory (June 1, 2005)

[LibraryLookup,] like all good solutions ... has now highlighted a new problem. How do you maintain that directory of links in a reliable robust way so that people can rely upon them? As posted previously the deep linking directory we have launched as part of our Silkworm project, already used by RegLightGreen to deep-link in to all publicly visible Talis OPACs, removes the need for link maintenance from directory providers, such as Jon has become.

The LibraryLookup Bookmarklet Generator now creates a Silkworm Directory compliant link for Talis libraries.

Open Access News presents a summary

Silkworm is a new initiative from Talis to make library content more visible and accessible. Since the Silkworm site doesn't explain the service very well, see the Silkworm white paper (June 13, 2005) or Paul Miller's long blog posting (June 16) about it. Excerpt from the white paper: 'Project Silkworm is based on the concept that library vendors must now collaborate in order to begin to deliver better services. This focus on participation (of both vendors and users) permeates the whole project and is captured in four key values: [1] Sharing and community over duplication and isolation, [2] Reuse over reinvention, [3] Openness and interoperability over exclusivity, [4] Experimentation over certainty...

UPDATE: CIE Thoughts has lots of comments, as well as talking about other innovative ideas like using Google Maps to display library locations (and click through to search their catalogues).

UPDATE 2005-06-19: I had a read through the white paper (linked above), which is quite visionary.  After my initial wondering it seems that SilkWorm is proposed extensive service layer that would reside on the Internet, for any information consumers to use.  Here's a relevant section from the white paper

5.3 What is Silkworm?

Silkworm is a service-orientated web 2.0 platform for making hidden web content discoverable, accessible and consumable.

This shared infrastructure provides a platform that application vendors (including Talis) can use to build applications that are not limited by the current silos and benefit from the massive network effect of collaboration. With Silkworm, value is generated by the applications built on it and the users that engage with it.

By definition the vast majority of applications that can be built on Silkworm are not Talis applications. The full richness of Silkworm is available to the whole development community including other Library vendors.

Therefore, Talis believes that Silkworm is one way that the industry will be able to lower the technical and economic cost of building the experiences that our users now expect.

As my organization is working on Web Services and exploring Service-Oriented Architecture, and as 5 minutes of using the library catalogue demonstrated to me that it wasn't worth Jack as a user interface, the Talis direction seems a good one.

UPDATE 2005-06-20: Lorcan Dempsey talks about how Talis uses the OCLC xISBN service with SilkWorm, mixed using Greasemonkey.

Jon Udell screencasts about library web rewriting

Jon Udell rocks my world.
I particularly like the casual way he says "I wrote a script to access my Amazon Wish List, check if the books are available in my local library, and make an RSS feed of the available books that I suck into Bloglines."

Overall he explains and shows far more clearly than I ever could how you can use web page re-writing to get your content where your users are.  (Taking LibraryLookup a step beyond to inserting links directly into Amazon result pages.)  He even takes an additional leap, doing pre-resolving of information.  What do I mean by that?  Most current resolver implementations have a button you click, and then that gives you some links, and then, maybe, you finally find out if the thing is actually available.  But Udell clearly sees that the computer should do all this work.  If the book is available, he shows a link.  If it's not, he doesn't show a link.

The whole thing is bloody brilliant.

Jon Udell: Content, services, and the yin-yang of intermediation

sending trackbacks from TypePad basic

via email discussion with The Distant Librarian (who has just updated his blog with a new look) I discovered that it's possible to send trackbacks with a basic TypePad account, but for some reason, only if you use the QuickPost bookmarklet (you can set this up once you're logged into TypePad).  Also it will only show the Trackback option if the target links in your posting support that feature.  On the downside, the bookmarklet doesn't appear to support setting multiple categories.

UPDATE 2006-01-03: As part of new(er) TypePad features, you can now send TrackBacks to a list of addresses you just provide in the regular web editor (a box "Send a TrackBack to these addresses") underneath the "Accept TrackBacks" checkbox.

CISTI bookmarklets

Stephen has released two bookmarklets with source code: Proxify CISTI and Highlight CISTI.
Scroll down on his Firefox Tools page to get them.

The way I use these in Firefox is to turn on the bookmarks toolbar (use menu View->Toolbars->Bookmarks Toolbar) and then just drag the links to the toolbar.  Then you can use them just like a clickable button.

UPDATE 2005-Dec-22: Visit CISTI Lab for the latest bookmarklets.

IngentaConnect tools to integrate with Google Scholar and Firefox

Google Scholar Highlighter

If you use Google Scholar, this bookmarklet will highlight the citations in your search results which have full text on IngentaConnect. Run your search and then click on the toolbar link to highlight the IngentaConnect results.

---------

Search IngentaConnect via Google Scholar

Use Google Scholar to search IngentaConnect. Highlight words on any web page and click the link, or enter words into the pop-up box.  Your search will be executed on Google but the results will be limited to those available on IngentaConnect.

from the IngentaConnect Labs PowerTools page

They have a Firefox search plugin on their main Ingenta Labs page.

extending Firefox

I have to type this again, because TypePad lets me wipe out my text by accidentally navigating to another page.  Anyway...

Firefox can be extended in multiple ways.
One of the easiest is the search box in the upper right-hand corner.
You can just click on the default Google G and it will pull down a list of the other installed plugins, as well as a link to add more.  I added Webster for dictionary searching (they already have Dictionary.com but I don't like it as much).

You can also of course write bookmarklets in JavaScript (which really in my head I still think of as LiveScript instead of this meaningless marketing name that has nothing to do with Java programming).

As well, you can add extensions, and create toolbars and sidebars.

And last but not least, you can make quick searches.

Everyone seems to be hot for toolbars, I'm not particularly clear why.
If it's just basic search you want, a search plugin or a quick search makes more sense.

The latest is a Yahoo toolbar.  There is also one for A9.

For some reason, this info doesn't seem to be presented all in one place.

Add search plugins:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/central.html#central-engines
Make search plugins:
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/

Quick Searches
The link I have is http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2002/bookmarks/
unfortunately this is currently down for me
You can get it from the Internet Archive.

You could use this to e.g. set up an ISBN search so that you would just type

isbn 1231231231

into the Firefox address bar.

bookmarklets
http://www.webreference.com/js/column35/

extensions
This tutorial may give you some insight on making Firefox extensions
http://roachfiend.com/archives/2004/12/08/how-to-create-firefox-extensions