Save Our Libraries - The Weblog

"For the past month, I have been posting articles regarding library closures and cutbacks to a weblog that I created (with the help of a friend) entitled Save Our Libraries (SOL). I have had contact with various people at ALA (including Mitch Freedman) regarding SOL and their recent press release on the subject and hope to work with ALA in any way that I can regarding this important aspect of our profession. As always, if you see any stories that would fit into the SOL schema, please contact me as well as promoting the site on your own weblog or library web site." [Library Stuff]

Great job, Steven! And of course there's an RSS feed.

I talked to Brian Kenney at Library Journal, and he quickly grasped the excitement of Jon Udell's LibraryLookup bookmarklet. He, in turn, wrote a brief piece about it, titled LibraryLookup: Go to Amazon, Find Library Book. It's good to see the library press finally picking up on this.

"Jon Udell, Lead Analyst at InfoWorld's test center, didn't set out to rock the world of library technology. He just wanted to check his local library's catalog while simultaneously browsing through Amazon.com. He soon developed LibraryLookup, a bookmarklet that can be installed on a browser's tool bar. "It's smart, simple, and incredibly slick," says Jenny Levine, Internet development specialist at the Suburban Library System, Burr Ridge, IL, who is among the growing group of librarians excited by the development."

Count Art Rhyno as another member of the "growing group of librarians excited by the development." In fact, I'd say that Art is the leading librarian-thinker on the topic because he keeps coming up with great ideas for extending Jon's original ideas. Art posted some of them over at /usr/lib/info.

Virtual Reference Toolbar

"I have run this by some observers who have a much better handle on virtual reference and the notion of a library search/ toolbar but I thought I would tap into the always insightful u/l/i crowd here. Since jaf's posting on Web4Lib the other week on the co-browsing work that came out of the hackfest, I have been flooded with mail. There seem to be several efforts to create virtual reference options in an Open Source framework, and I have been thinking about a way to tie together this with the searchbar and the bookmarklet apps. The glue for some of it at least seems to be applications like Dave's Quick Search Taskbar (DQSD), and WebSearcher. What I really like about DQSD is that it uses javascript as a core scripting engine, so that the hooks are there for wiring in some of the external pieces. Or even better yet, use the Amphetadesk approach and layer the application directly into the browser."

Be sure to read through his whole post, because he's off and running. Unfortunately, I don't have the technical know-how to help Art implement his ideas (or my own, for that matter). Any more knowledgeable librarians out there up to the challenge?

I really want to see us go further with all of this, but I was trying to impart to Brian why it's all so fascinating. Even beyond the potential for new library tools for patrons, Jon's little experiment (well, it started out little but then mushroomed) contains many interesting angles:

• Non-librarians extending library services without any assistance from us (let alone our knowledge of it);
• The role web services can play if we build our catalogs right;
• What does this mean for our catalogs and specifically for our catalog vendors? Do we need to be holding them to different standards that ensure this type of inter-operability? For example, my home library just came up on a new Sirsi system, but it won't work with these bookmarklets. Ouch!
• Jon has been using a relatively new service, Technorati, to track cross-blog conversations in what I consider to be a real first;
• Innovative actually took down their customer list in response. I'd love to hear their side of this.