Day 3, IL2009 -Mashups for Library Data with Nicole Engard

I was looking forward to hearing Darlene Fichter as part of this presentation on Mashups, but Nicole did a supurb job all by herself in explaining mashups and showing how they can be used in a library setting. She first defined the term Mashup as a “web application that combines data from more than one souce into a single integrated tool.”

Types of Mashups –
Mapping 35%
Photo 10%
Shopping 9%
Video 8%
Search 8%
Travel 6%
Social 6%

Mashups & Libraries: why?

Provide better services to our patrons
Added value to our websites and catalogs
Promoting library services where the patrons are
It’s a learning experience – and we never turn down learning experiences!

Mashups & Libraries: How?

Ask vendors for APIs
Mashup library data with popular web services
Put your library and your library data out there whenever possible
Create RSS feeds for library content.

What kinds of mashups for Libraries can we use? – - simplest mashup – location mashup – tool on Google Maps website that will generate the code for you.

Collections on Flickr – share your collection on Flickr and then bring it into your website.  http://flickr.com/commons
Read Flickr’s api page !!

Website Mashups – Join any service with an RSS feed – blogs, wikis, flickr, calendars, bookmarks, etc.

Among the tools Nicole discussed was Yahoo! Pipes.  Although I’d done some very basic work with Pipes before, Nicole showed us some very interesting things we can do with this free tool.  Delicious.com is another site that is easily able to be used in library-related mashups, especially in compiling unique resource pages for our patrons.  It seems like it’s much harder to turn our OPACs into mashups because of the proprietary nature of the systems and the difficulty in getting the APIs from our individual vendors.  We need to be pro-active in working with our OPAC vendor to get the data needed to create mashups to better serve our users.
I thought Nicole Engard made mashups easy to understand and gave us some examples of these applications not just for work but also for fun!