September 2009 Archives

Announcing the next WorldCat Mashathon. Sponsored by the OCLC Developer Network and the University of Washington libraries, the WorldCat Mashathon will be held Thursday and Friday, November 5-6 at Odegaard Undergraduate Library in Seattle, WA.

The Seattle Mashathon will follow the same format as previous events in Amsterdam and New York. You'll spend two days brainstorming and coding mash-ups with local systems and other Web services to take advantage of all that WorldCat, the world's largest and most comprehensive bibliographic database, has to offer. Developers from the library community and beyond are encouraged to attend.

WorldCat includes materials from libraries around the world, including images, video games, movies, articles, books, maps and more.

Why attend the WorldCat Mashathon?
• Brainstorm potential apps for the WorldCat Search API, our bibliographic grouping services and other OCLC Web services.
• Get a preview of the new WorldCat Basic API.
• Gain development access to 1.4 billion items from more than 10,000 libraries worldwide.
• Integrate these resources with many others to create innovative new services.
• Meet fellow developers across the information industry.
• Share your creative vision and be a part of the next wave of online library development.

Roy will kick off the session, as usual. Fellow OCLC Developer Network staff will also be around to answer questions and help you make best use of your time. You'll come away with a fountain of ideas and good contacts for continuing development. Outcomes and code from the Mashathon will be shared during and after the event, in case you're not able to attend. A small fee of US$ 30 is required, but please contact us if the fee poses a significant hardship.

Learn more and register now for the Mashathon.

Next week is the 2009 Access Conference, hosted by the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown, PEI. Long a tradition at that conference has been a full-day Hackfest, where anyone who is interested (you don't have to be a programmer!) gets together to tackle library problems with imagination, whiteboarding, and software.

I've attended a couple of times, and it's always a fun time and you tend to learn quite a bit and meet new people. Unfortunately, due to a schedule conflict, I can't make it this year. But since there may be a problem people are working on that can benefit from having access to OCLC Web Services, we are providing some access keys to the conference to be used not just during the Hackfest, but throughout the conference. As anyone familiar with Access knows, Hackfesters have been known to keep hacking away during odd bits of time and during the evenings while the conference continues. Not me, mind you, but others more dedicated than I. Here's hoping it's successful and a lot of fun.

Meanwhile, I will be flying in on Thursday, hopefully just in time to present "ILS in the Sky With Diamonds" along with Mike Rylander of Evergreen fame. The next day I'll make sure you're thoroughly sick of me by presenting on some work we're doing in OCLC Research to begin to characterize the Hathi Trust collection.

Mashable.com included the Facebook CiteMe app in its recent list of "15 Essential Web Tools For Students". Bruce Washburn built the CiteMe app last year as the WorldCat Search API was being developed.

CiteMe makes use of the API's OpenSearch implementation, and a feature that makes it easy to include pre-formatted citations in the results. On the Developer Network site you can find more information on how to do this. There's also an API feature that will return formatted citations for an individual record, using its OCLC number or an ISBN. Thanks to Rob Casson, The Miami University Library catalog is using this feature to good effect in its "Cite" links in search results and individual record displays.

We're glad to see uses like this of the WorldCat Search API getting more attention, and that these services are being integrated into the web environments of our member libraries.

Back to school time for IT staff at libraries usually involves a handful of new databases to configure and an updated version of EZproxy access and authentication software. This year is no different: the latest version (5.2) is now available. A snippet of the enhancements going on in this release:

• New directive for use in LDAP authentication, which allows the search filters that are used in login to also be used when reading attributes.
• EZproxy now allows vector notation in the user.txt file, to give III systems more flexibility with contact information.
• The sample config.txt updated to include more stanzas for OCLC resources, so it's easier and faster to add a new database to your configuration file.
• See the full list and get the details on all the 5.2 changes.

If you have specific questions about your installation, the EZproxy listserv is usually a good first step.