News: August 2009 Archives

Deep Web Content

By bobrobboy on August 31, 2009 11:00 AM |

Libraries subscribe to databases of content, like you and I might subscribe to a newspaper or a magazine. Like us, libraries buy these subscriptions based their interests or the interests of their communities.

A medical library at a university might pay for access to highly specialized content about surgical techniques, but that access is limited to their students, staff and professors. A public library might subscribe to a database that provides environmental or business regulation data for their entrepreneurial and business communities. This content is hidden deep within subscription-based Web sites that require authorization. The content is seldom exposed in Web searches, but your library can make some of this hidden content available to you.

Libraries that have set up access to their subscription databases on WorldCat.org, enable their users to search these hidden, licensed databases as well as the print, audio and video collections in the library all at one time. If your library is doing this, you have access to a lot of deep Web content. But the rest of us do not.

And that is the topic of a panel discussion that OCLC has proposed for the 2010 South by Southwest (SXSW) conference. We've submitted a proposal for a panel on "Discovery, Identity and Rights: Three Deep Web Problems." But we need YOUR "thumbs-up" in order to increase the odds of our proposal being selected.

The selection process closes on Friday, Sept. 4 so please take a moment to visit the SXSW PanelPicker and give us a thumbs up: http://bit.ly/vuPu5. You'll be asked to register, but it's a very simple process.

Help us and a panel of licensing, business and identity experts answer the question: "What if you could search all of the content available to you?"

The week in tweets (8/21/09 - 8/27/09)

By Andy on August 28, 2009 9:27 AM |

Twitter messages from the @OCLC account between Friday, August 21 and Thursday, August 27 2009.

Good news for WorldCat Affiliates: an API for all

By Alice Sneary on August 26, 2009 1:34 PM | | Comments (1)

For those developer/tech-oriented among us, we have some good news.
worldcatsearchapi badge.jpgWorldCat Search API enhanced
The WorldCat Search API now enables developers to limit the results returned to an individual library, without authentication.

With this functionality enhancement, the eligibility requirements for the WorldCat Search API have also been updated.

NB: ALL 200+ current WorldCat Search API WSKeys will remain active through at least September 1, 2010. This eligibility change should affect very few future requests for service. In addition, there is even more good news if your library doesn't currently qualify--or if you're a developer who is not connected to a library.

WorldCat Basic API planned
As much as we love WorldCat.org, we've wanted to provide an additional general Web service to WorldCat for a long time now. So we're very excited that later this year you'll have access to a simple API into WorldCat that anyone and everyone in the world can use, for noncommercial use. Called the WorldCat Basic API, it will provide a mashable access point for lightweight apps built by developers who may or may not have ties to the library community.

Sign up for the monthly e-mail updates to hear when WorldCat Basic API is available, and start planning your apps now!

The week in tweets

By Andy on August 21, 2009 1:55 PM |
In addition to being a blogger here, I'm also one of the team members who posts tweets to OCLC's Twitter account. If you'd like to follow us, we're @OCLC (not surprisingly).

Despite Twitter's growing popularity, though, some people prefer to get their online news in other formats, of course, including blogs. Since some of the links we post from Twitter might be interesting to readers of the WorldCat Blog, we thought we would try copying them from there to here once a week. If folks think it's useful, we'll keep doing it.

OCLC Tweets from August 14 - August 20, 2009 (in reverse chronological order; most recent to least).

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