A del.icio.us directory

Put a tag cloud of the most widely held library works on your Web site or blog

By Andy Havens

OCLC Top 1000 Tag Cloud

Whether it’s David Letterman’s famous “Top 10” lists, Academy Award winners or the New York Times best-sellers, there’s an appeal to knowing who or what is the “top,” the “most” and the “best.”

What are the most popular items in library collections? Does your library own them?

The “OCLC Top 1000” list presents the top works most widely held by libraries. First published in the fall of 2004, the list was most recently updated in 2005. The list reflects true classics and canonical works of western culture. The list also shows the extent to which libraries strive to meet the needs of their readers, by offering books in high demand in any given year. The list contains classic works such as the Bible, utilitarian works such as the U.S. Census and also popular works such as Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation.

Beginning with a list of all items held in WorldCat by libraries around the globe, the list brings together different printings and editions and translations for each item. Titles are then ranked in descending order by the number of each work held by libraries.

In April 2007, OCLC added del.icio.us tags for each of the items described by the list. del.icio.us is a social bookmarking Web site (now owned by Yahoo!) that allows users to store and share Internet bookmarks. Users categorize links with descriptive keywords called “tags.” The del.icio.us bookmarks created for the OCLC Top 1000 all link back into WorldCat.org and, thus, to the libraries that hold them. The tags for the list include tag categories such as genre (e.g., “autobiography,” “banned,” “children,” etc.), language and time-period.

OCLC Top 1000 Web Site

In the same way the WorldCat syndication program enables library materials to be indexed by major search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, adding del.icio.us tags for the OCLC Top 1000 list makes it easier for users to discover library resources through other Web systems. All part of getting more library data out “into the flow.”

To include a tag cloud, similar to the illustration below, of the OCLC Top 1000 on your library’s blog or Web site, paste the following code into your hypertext (all one line, no breaks; Javascript support required): <script type=”text/javascript” src=”http:// del.icio.us/feeds/js/tags/oclc2005top100 0?icon;size=12-33;color=66ccff-333399; title=OCLC%20Top%201000;name;show add”></script>

Andrew Houghton, a software engineer with OCLC Programs and Research, converted list data already available in an Excel spreadsheet into a form that could be uploaded programmatically to del.icio.us. A Visual Basic for Applications macro took the Excel data and pushed it out to del.icio.us using that site’s API (Application Programming Interface).

According to Houghton, the process was fairly simple. “I read the del.icio.us help page, looked over their API—which is fairly uncomplicated—and did the programming in Visual Basic to turn our categories into tags and upload the bookmarks.”

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