Now you all know of my fondness for client-side mashups and augmenting your web experience with OER; this passion was kindled by projects like Jon Udell’s LibraryLookup bookmarklet (annotate Amazon book pages with links to your local library to see if the book is in) and COSL’s OER Recommender (later Folksemantic, a script that annotates pages with links to relevant Open Educational Resources.) What I love about these and similar projects is that they augment your existing workflow and don’t aim at perfection, just to be “good enough.” In all cases, what these types of automated annotation services require are two things: 1) some “knowledge” about the “subject” they are trying to annotate (in the LibraryLookup case the ISBN in the URL, with folksemantic – I’ve never been clear!) and; 2) a source to query  (your local library OPAC/a database of tagged OER resources) hopefully in a wel structured way with an easily parseable response.

So what struck me while looking at the wikipedia page is that (following the Principle of Good Enough) the URLs by and large follow a standard pattern (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%page_name%) where %page_name% is very often a usable “keyword” for a search of some system (condition #1 above) and that library OPACs contain a metric shitload of curated metadata including both keyword and title fields (close to condition #2 above.)

So the first iteration of the idea was “Wouldn’t it be great if I could write a combined LibraryLookup/Folksonomic script that annotated wikipedia pages with subject-appropriate links to your local library catalog of books on that subject.”

Now one of the weaknesses of the LibraryLookup approach was the need for a localized version of the script for each OPAC it needed to talk to. Means it doesn’t spread virally as well as it might and is often limited to tech savvy users. So the next obvious (well at least to this non-librarian) iteration was

“Wouldn’t it be great if I could write a combined LibraryLookup/Folksonomic script that annotated wikipedia pages with subject-appropriate links to query WorldCat instead”

in the hopes of performing a single query that can then be localized by the user adding their location data in WorldCat. But… as a number of librarian friends who I ran this by pointed out, WorldCat is pay-to-play for libraries, and in BC at least does not have wide coverage at all. Still, a step in the right direction, because further discussion brought me to the last iteration of…

… “Wouldn’t it be great if I could write a combined LibraryLookup/Folksonomic script that annotated wikipedia pages with subject-appropriate links that instead of annotating with an OPAC/book references, used fully open resources, but instead of OER (which folksemantic already does), use a service like OAIster with it’s catalogue of 23 million Open Access articles and thesis.”

Liking this idea more and more, I then realized that OAIster had since been incorporated into WorldCat (though I must admit, not finding it very intuitive to figure out how to query *just* OAIster/open access resources).

So this is where I got to, but I was fortunate to talk through the idea with two fantastic colleagues from the library world, Paul Joseph from UBC and Gordon Coleman from BC’s Electronic Library Network. And I am glad I did, because while they didn’t completely squash this idea, they did refer me to a large number of possible solutions and approaches in the library world to look at.

While it’s not “client side,” (which for me is not just a nicety but actually an increasingly critical implementation detail) a small tweak to WorldCat’s keyword search widget embedded in mediawiki/wikipedia looks like it would do the trick.

Paul pointed me towards an existing toolbar, LibX, that is open source, customizable by institution, and extensible that could (and who knows, maybe already does) easily be extended to do this by the looks of it.

Paul also reminded me of the HathiTrust as another potential queryable source, growing all the time.

And the discussion also clue’d me in to the existence of the OpenURL gateway service, which seems very much to solve the issue of localized versions of the librarylookup bookmarklet and the like.

So… is this worth pursuing? Quite possibly not – it seems like pretty well covered ground by the libraries, as it should be, and it’s the type of idea that if it hasn’t been done, I am MORE than happy for someone else to run with it. I am looking for tractable problems like this to ship code on, but I’m just as happy when these ideas inspire others to make improvements to their existing projects. The important things to me are:

• approaches which meet the users where they already are (in this case Wikipedia or potentially mediawiki)
• approaches that don’t let existing mounds of expensive metadata go to waste (heck, might as well use it!)
• approaches that place personalization aspects on the client side; increasingly we will be surfing a “personalized’ web, but approaches that require you to store extensive information *on their servers* in order to get that effect are less desireable; the client is a perfect spot, under the end users control (look, I’m not naive)
• approaches that fit into existing workflow in the “good enough” or 80/20 approach

I think this fits all of the above; if you have other criteria I’d love to hear them (certainly these aren’t MY only ones either.) If you do know where this idea has been implemented, please let me know. And if my unschooled approach to the wonderful world of online library services ticks any librarians off, my sincerest apologies – I’ve always said that “librarians ae the goal tenders of our institutions” (I was a defence man, this is a big compliment) and my only goal is to bridge what feels like a massive divide between educational technologists, librarians and, most importantly, learners. – SWL

I am currently participating in a cool exercise in prognostication on emerging technologies and learning and one of my votes/pleas for a disruptive technology in the academy is “mashups” (which I realize aren’t properly a specific “technology” so much as a technique, but whatever.)

So it was with great pleasure that I stumbled on Jenny Levine’s post on the Talis Library Mashup competition. The full list of entries is here, and while it feels a bit tame, it is definitely a start. The library seems definitely like one of the potential on-campus sources to be mashed up. What are the others? Well, to serve as the basis for a mashup, on my read at least, you need to be providing 2 things; some data and a way to get at it (an API, web service/XML feeds, screenscraping, or other mechanism for access, the more public the better). And there’s the rub, it seems. While more and more Web2.0 companies (holy cow – 291 on this list) are offering APIs that are being mashed up (arguably often with a still-unknown value proposition) is your IS department publishing the API for your SIS on your campus website? You CMS? Why would they do this? Well, that’s the other side of the mashup phenomenom – often-times the companies making their data available don’t yet know all the ways it could be used, but appear to be correct in the belief that if you publish it, it will get used, often in unexpected or improved ways.

It’s likely the sources on campus that will serve mashups anytime soon aren’t the “enterprise” systems but departmental or discipline-based ones (various GIS-based systems seem ripe to combine the Google and Yahoo maps of the world; text collections with things like Yahoo’s term extraction service, etc). And I don’t want to trivialize the challenges to security and privacy in accessing some of the enterprise data. But right now it feels like a brick wall – ask and you’ll get a strong ‘No’; not a considered one but the idea just rejected out of hand. But you know the trick; keep asking, eventually you’ll wear them down (or they’ll retire – SWL

Plenty good reads in the latest Ariadne magazine, the 10th anniversary edition, including pieces by Lorcan Dempsey and Clifford Lynch. Although Ariadne aims to be a “web magazine for information professionals in archives, libraries and museums” I always find at least a couple of articles directly relating to (if not directly referring to) issues in elearning. – SWL

Kudos to the BC Electronic Library Network for trying the interesting experiment of using Blogger as a mechanism to facilitate collectively brainstorming by their members. As I understand the model, staff from the participating partner libraries are invited to either comment on posts, or log into Blogger using accounts that ELN has set up for them that can make new posts on the main brainstorming blog, all of which will be fed into the larger Strategic Planning process. Nice model for a consortia to use as it keeps it open and public but hopefully still provides some autonomy and flow. Will be interesting to see how it works, and at the very least may be a step in exposing some additional librarians to the technology (not that most of them need this, we are lucky to have an amazingly sophisticated bunch in our province.) – SWL

O.k., o.k. already! I am showing my age/lameness. In my exuberance over learning that my local library’s catalogue was now searchable via Jon Udell’s famous LibraryLookup bookmarklet (and trust me, I can get pretty exuberant), I forgot how terribly passe and 2003 that was. Apparently time has moved on since then; last year Udell released a small Greasemonkey script that searches your libraries catalogue in the background and adds a link if the book is available right on the Amazon page.

If you happen to live in Victoria, you can grab my ever so-slightly modified version of that script at the URL above and install it in your Greasemonkey-enabled Firefox browser. And turns out this post isn’t so out of date after all – if you are really keen, Udell released the extra souped-up version of the script (which requires you to get your own Amazon-API) on January 26th. Soo coool! All praise Udell. – SWL

Hard to believe, but it’s almost 3 years since one of the first really cool Web2.doh! mashups, Jon Udell’s ‘LibraryLookup’ boomarklet, first hit the streets. You remember this one (maybe you use it everyday?), it allowed you to query your local library’s catalogue with one click from any book-related page that had an ISBN number in the URL (like an Amazon listing, for instance).

I remember being very excited when I first found this, only to become frustrated that my local library, the GVPL, was using a library catalogue at the time that couldn’t be queried via ISBN, so the bookmarklet wouldn’t work.

So I forgot about it, until the serendipity of the blogosphere brought me back to Udell’s site today, and I thought maybe I would try it out again. And it worked!

This is very cool – I actually keep my ‘things I’d like to read‘ list basically in Amazon’s wishlist and this provides a nice tie-in for me to easily folow up now into my library catalogue to see if the book’s there. Not groundshaking, maybe, but I know this will actually increase the number of these books I end up reading and not just wishing for. – SWL

I know the “professionals” who work on search, taxonomies, the semantic web and the like will all know about this resource, but many who are interested in topics like “folksonomies” could do worse than spend a bit of time reading some of the papers published in the CSDL’s online library of publications. If you are interested in these kinds of topics, be prepared to set aside many hours for what you find, (and also to turn on your ‘academic publications’ bullsh*t filter – god how I detest some of the conventions of academic writing, much as I understand why they exist). – SWL

I know nothing about this system, but it caught my eye as significant as it is the first CMS that I know of coming from a library catalog vendor and being built on top of collection of library materials.

For those who lament the seemingly dominant instructivist bent of current CMS this seems hardly a good thing, likewise the ‘small pieces’ crowd. But as my colleague Bruce Landon keeps reminding me in our discussions about learning object repositories, at the end of the day, libraries are the ones with the budget dollars and seemingly more entrenched institutional mandates and may well end up being where many of these systems get located. – SWL

One of a number of interesting services and tools funded by the NSDL, Metis is “a workflow system designed to support the workflow needs of digital libraries.” This Java-based application seems ot only work against its own internal store of users, but different events and roles can be configured to perform actions such as file compression, mvoing files, creating timers and new users and email notification. There is an API published, and you seem to get the source code in the download though no indication I could find of the license status. – SWL

The University of British Columbia’s main library is implementing a system in which books are shelved in stacks accessible only to computer controlled robotic cranes. Users will call up books from computer terminals and they will be fetched for them.

Makes a lot of sense, especially as the volume of works explodes and the physical space can’t expand to keep up. This article, though, in part laments this innovation, noting it will likely cause the “lost pleasure of [the] ‘unexpected’,” that title beside the one you were searching for that actually ends up being the treasure you needed but hadn’t sought. (read more…)

So what does this have to do with educational technology. Maybe not a lot, but for some time I have wanted to respond to the seemingly unmitigated glee of some of my fellow ed tech bloggers over the death knell being sounded for metadata, in particular human generated multi-level taxonomies (see this, this, this, and many others to boot).

To be fair, many of them are not taking on taxonomies per se, just the onerous means that many systems (especially learning object repositories) have placed on users to create metadata. Really, I have no argument with this.

But I do have an issue with the effects that so-called ‘flattened keyword browsing’ will have on the above noted serendipitous ‘pleasure of the unexpected.’ When we throw out multi-level taxonomies, we also through out the side-effect of teaching people about the shape of the collection (and thus the shape of the discipline) as they look for things.

To take an example from Brian’s post on flickr, it’s one thing to click on the keyword ‘Vancouver’ and see all photos that used that keyword. One might even notice the keyword ‘Gastown’ amongst those same pictures, and by clicking on it get another collection of images grouped around this term. One could make an educated guess that ‘Gastown’ was a part of ‘Vancouver,’ and one would be right, but there’s nothing strong about this connection, and there’s definitely nothing telling a user that – “hey, if you are interested in neighborhoods of Vancouver like Gastwon, there’s another one called ‘Yaletown’ that you may also be interested in.”

It’s not clear to me that you couldn’t improve flickr to show end users some of these other connections in keywords; I think you probably could, but I’m no flickr expert. But it’s the very nature of hierarchical taxonomies to exhibit these parent-child relationships, and in so doing teach people more about the structure of the domain. I would suggest this is an invaluable aid to learning that should not be lost, especially in the lower grade levels. I just can’t help but feel that the flattening of taxonomies associated with ‘easy’ systems like flickr seems like so much baby-with-the-bathwater; sure you get rid of some workload, but at what expense? – SWL