December 2009 Archives
Thanks to some quick footwork by a few of OCLC's staff and the guys at Occipital, the company behind the iPhone app RedLaser, WorldCat.org libraries now appear within the mobile apps item search pages.
RedLaser users can scan a book and see the libraries near them that have that book. Then they can click to one of those libraries and get hours, phone numbers and driving directions.
We're putting WorldCat.org data to use and putting libraries right in the mobile user's flow.
From all your friends who bring you WorldCat.org, here's hoping for a happy, warm and healthy holiday season for you and your loved ones.
To help you get into the holiday spirit, we've put together a list of our favorite books, videos, CDs and more for the holidays. But more importantly, here are some of your favorites during the festive season:
Favorite Christmas movies by Pammers
Christmas for kids by brungrrl
Christmas music books by Sarah Easter
Kwanzaa by booksdiva
Winter Holiday Reading by eacarlson
Research's Holiday List by ResearchHolidayList
The CDC collection by EducationLibrary has a few book suggestions:
Hanukkah| Kwanzaa | Christmas
What are your holiday favorites? Create a list on WorldCat.org and post it to the WorldCat Facebook page.
Happy holidays and see you next year!
A couple of years ago, I saw a fascinating documentary on the history of Santa Claus - how he came to be, why his outfit is red and white, perspectives from other countries, and much more. As you might expect, the number of publications about the generous jolly fellow has been increasing steadily since the first item in 1810. If you're looking for a little distraction from baking cookies or finishing up your shopping, check out Santa's identities page on worldcat.org.
Happy Holidays!
Now anyone and everyone can create apps and mash-ups using library data from WorldCat, because the WorldCat Basic API is here!
This new API is a simple interface to WorldCat. It's envisioned to be most useful for lightweight or mobile apps, developed by people outside the library space. Still, anyone is welcome to build noncommercial services with it. [Commercial services are also welcome, but they must go through the WorldCat partnership team to gain access.]
It supports up to 1,000/queries per day in OpenSearch and retrieves results in RSS or Atom. It also provides:
- Information about books, videos, music and more in WorldCat
- Information about authors, titles, ISBNs and OCLC numbers
- Standard bibliographic citation formats in HTML (APA, Chicago, Harvard, MLA, and Turabian)
- A link back to WorldCat.org for geographically-sorted library information
- An easy way to include library results in comparison-shopping Web sites, mobile or Facebook apps
To gain access to the WorldCat Basic API, select the WorldCat Basic API on the WorldCat Affiliates Tools page. Sign in with your WorldCat Affiliates account and then you'll be taken to a specific site where your individual WS Key will be auto-generated. If you already have a WorldCat Search API WSKey, then you do NOT need a WorldCat Basic API WSKey.
By making the collective library data in WorldCat as accessible as possible to ALL developers, we hope to generate more awareness and traffic to libraries in general. Which is really good for everybody, isn't it?
Happy coding! We'll be excited to see what new and interesting apps and mashups you create!
Two additional databases called PapersFirst and ProceedingsFirst have now also been added to WorldCat.org results. These two indexes contain papers from conferences, symposiums and expositions worldwide. Created from items received by The British Library Document Supply Centre--you'll find 7.4 million published items in English, French, Spanish and Chinese.
If you track specific conferences, or do in-depth research on specific topics, these materials can bring depth and richness to your research. See a sample listing below for representative PapersFirst and ProceedingsFirst items:
- Fighting fire with fire: brain stimulation for the treatment of epilepsy (PapersFirst)
- Strategies towards sustainability of protected cultivation in mild winter climate (ProceedingsFirst)
Happy conference paper reading!
Here's the Top 20 List for November in order of views. Items new to the list are emphasized in italics:
1. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
2. Push by Sapphire
3. New Moon by Stephenie Meyer
4. Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
5. Nursing Theorists and Their Work edited by Ann Marriner-Tomey and Martha Raile Alligood
6. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
7. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
8. Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
9. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
10. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
11. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling
12. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
13. Peace, Love & Baby Ducks by Lauren Myracle
14. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
15. Hope's Boy by Andrew Bridge
16. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers by Joseph Gibaldi and the Modern Language Association of America
17. The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman
18. Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man by Steve Harvey
19. Molly's Pilgrim by Barbara Cohen
20. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days by Jeff Kinney
Gone from the list:
A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle
Musicophilia by Oliver W. Sacks
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association by the American Psychological Association
The World Factbook by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Foreign Assessment Center
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett
