Mix and mash for librarians

Nicole Engard’s Library Mashups is a useful guide that can help libraries and info pros understand how to extract business benefits from mashup applications.

The book deals expertly with the difficult task of communicating innovative technologies. It befriends rather than alienates, encouraging a community composed more of digital migrants than digital natives to embrace useful yet simple web concepts. For instance, it defines mashup in simple terms as a web application that combines content from more than one source to create a single new service with a single graphical interface. So libraries can mash up data from a variety of sources into their own single source, which can be more convenient for users.

The book constantly uses positive words like "all", "social", "open", "open data" and "open access". "We’re used to applying words such as free, value, robust and enrich to physical library services, but we’ve been less able to apply these terms to our online services," librarian and blogger Jenny Levine points out in the foreword. "In fact, the online catalogs are described in the opposite terms – cumbersome, silo, difficult, arcane and closed."

The first of Library Mashups’ five sections deals with the basics: technical details, preparing data for a mashup, and how to mash up with a librarian’s knowledge and skills. The second part specifically covers mashing up on library sites. Part three discusses catalogue data such as mashing up open data, using backlight to expose collections, and so on.

The fourth section provides the most gripping pages of all, explaining how to use mashups in maps, pictures and videos. Its quirky chapters include: Where’s the nearest computer lab?; mapping up campus; a repository mashup map; Flickr and digital images collections; and blip.tv (a site with videos, podcasts and other content that can be cross-posted).

In recent years, academic libraries and historical and cultural institutions have painstakingly built digital image archives by scanning and cataloguing documents. The book explains that while this has allowed institutions to share images more efficiently with users, it has limitations in a Web 2.0 world, because the images reside in a data silo which prevents them being intermixed with other data and will not support web-friendly applications.

The chapter also deals with the creative adaptation of Flickr-like applications in academia. The ‘academic Flickr’ would let academics contribute content to a digital repository and allow browser-based user tools, social web features such as tagging, sharing and commenting. It would also allow large scale data migration and updating, and objects to be managed by multiple users.

The final section engages the reader to advance to the next level of adding value to their services. It explains topics such as database search mashup and electronic dissertation mashups using SRUs (search and retrieve URLs), and so on.

Each section takes the reader to new mashup techniques, but lucid explanations simplify mashup methods and suggest ways for librarians to maximise value by using them on their own digital images, video archives, maps and documents. Case studies show librarians how to repurpose third-party data and tools to enrich their own services as well as free up their resources beyond the confines of their websites.

Mashups are all about inclusion, sharing and assembling information that is scattered. Info pros can learn about innovative ways to deliver library data and services while involving users and equipping their organisations for this century.

The book illustrates how librarians can use mashups to improve their services, such as map mashups. A professional can add a map link to their library location page. "The link calls up Google Maps with a pushpin for the location of your library and an overlay window that provides basic information such as library hours," Engard explains.

Library Mashups convinces the reader that copying and pasting a bit of code into a website can do wonders for information sharing and content management. And with human and financial resources shrinking in many libraries, it is designed to help librarians with limited budgets.

Nor is it just for tech novices. The final section explains advanced applications such as LibraryThing, a library catalogue whose Covers API can help libraries replace paid subscriptions to commercial cover provider services. The more covers that are added to the LibraryThing works pages, the more cost-effective it becomes. Web-based copy-cataloguing service Zack is also covered.

The book’s explanations on Flickr, Yahoo, LibraryThing, Google Maps and Delicious for sharing and combining digital content should help readers find innovative ways to make their libraries relevant, up-to-date, collaborative and dynamic at a time when users are becoming more web-savvy and demanding.

The only possible item on a wishlist for the book would be for examples of mashup-mistakes – such as not being mindful of security before mashing up business-critical data or not making mashups reusable. That way, info pros would know what to steer clear of.

Archana Venkatraman_