The discussion was wide ranging and I only caught part of it due to a previous discussion going over. This was also the last one. Some general themes were how some of the “web2.0” services could be used in libraries and how library services could be updated to be more user friendly. Libraries aren't dead. Culture of fear, though it may help change. Might be put in retirement home though.
One of the best plugins for Wordpress is Akismet, the centralized spam filter. It picks up almost every spam comment on this blog and has had very few false positives. It also learns from comments that you mark as spam so it’s likely to just get better. It’s probably the sole reason I’ve been able to keep comments open and not 100% moderated. I don’t get much traffic so it’s not as huge a difference for me but it has blocked 600+ spams since I recently upgraded it and has helped with some recent spam floods I’ve gotten.
For more information on Library Camp check out the Library2.0 wiki. This discussion went over the various hacks and problems that allow patrons to reuse information from the library or make it easier to use the library’s offerings. Some notes: Jon Udell's LibraryLookup Bookmarklet helps people move between Amazon and the OPAC. Problems included that it's dependent on the site and can break. It's also dependent on ISBN. There are Greasemonkey scripts that use xISBN to try to get around this limitation.
For those III institutions not as adventurous as AADL, you may want to be able to pass the bib number for a record to your own scripts. In this way you can use the stock OPAC but still add functionality externally. I’ll give an example below and some other ideas at the end. So let’s start with an example. Our library doesn’t use the stock recall functionality. They prefer to do it themselves and so have a webform that patrons can fill out.
FYI, if you try to access any of my XML server demo’s you’ll probably get an error message. We had to turn our xml server off for the time being due to some problems. I’m hopeful that it’ll be back on in the near future. Just a quick note that it’s not just my shoddy programming at work ;-) Oh and I thank John for his kind words.
Featured lists are another thing I’d like to use more of. The ability to pull the latest books and other data from the server would be nice. While I figured out how to pull the information, the XML server appears to ignore my limiting and returns the whole list no matter what. This can be problematic if you have a large featured list. The way to get a featured list from the xmlopac is just take the list number and add a zero in front.
Continuing day 1 of the conference. Lipstick on a Pig by Jim Robertson Slides (ppt) This session was a list of many things you can do with your opac to make it a bit more useful. This includes pulling data from other API’s or supplementing it with your own programming. Most of the stuff has been discussed on various blogs. The one thing that was new was the virtual reference. When someone accesses the virtual reference chat from the opac it will pass a session number that the reference librarian can use to view the person’s current search session, making it easier to identify problems with their searching.
I should have posted this some time ago. There’s supposed to be audio coming but I have yet to see it. This conference was full of information so I’m going to split up the posts. A schedule with links to presentations is available. If my memory is too vague feel free to comment and correct. I have to stress that this only gives you a small idea of the great information at this conference.
If you haven’t already seen it on Blyberg’s blog or on Superpatron’s there is a sort of informal meetup of lib2.0 people at the Ann Arbor Distric Library. They call it an “unconference” but i’ll call it a meetup. There’s a wiki page for signup. I’m not ashamed to say I’m looking forward to meeting a non-library person than the lib people. I’m going to try to make it though I have already disagreed with people.
I recently finished a book I was reading (Virgin Suicides) and decided to request some of the web development books Amazon has been recommending. They all managed to arrive today and I started with Don’t Make Me Think. It was a nice quick read but it manages to fit a lot of good points. Most are common sense but it helps to see them again as they can be lost in debates with librarian ;-)