Just a reminder that the library camp is tomorrow, Thursday March 20th. More information is on libsuccess.org: The next Library Camp will be held Thursday, March 20th, 2008, at the Downtown Branch of the Ann Arbor District Library, from 9:30 AM - 4:00 PM. The goal is to get a bunch of people together, and let them talk about whatever they’d like to talk about, within the rough purview of libraries and library technology.
As you’ve probably read elsewhere Google finally released a way to get book availability on Google Books. It’s a fairly simple web service where you hand it an identifier and it gives back whether the book is on Google Books and how much so (no view, partial view, full view) along with cover images. AADL previously scraped for the information which I’ve now disabled and used the new API instead. It was fairly easy with a little jquery and small changes to catwrap.
I’m still digesting all the discussions and information from code4lib but I remembered a conversation I eavesdropped on. Casey reminded me it was between him and Adam Brin of Tri-College. The gist was that they had put a “txt this record to me” feature onto the catalog, without any real demand, which then took off to everyone’s surprise. It was one of those “that would be cool” that then turned into a “how did we do without it” for some students.