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AutoSuggest Implementations Abounds

Over the course of the last 6 months, autosuggesters have been making an appearance many places in library user interfaces. OCLC Research has piloted auto suggest functionality in a development version of Identities and in VIAF. The Identities autosuggest functionality is outlined in issue 9 of code4lib journal article. Currently, the Identities autosuggest is experimental. VIAF also includes an autosuggest feature which can be seen on viaf.org .

Submitted by librarywebchic on Thu, 11/11/2010 - 11:29am
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WorldCat Mashathon Boston 2010 Show and Tell

groupphoto.JPGWell well well, WorldCat Mashathon Boston, sponsored by the OCLC Developer Network, Brandeis University and Microsoft seems like ages ago, I know--and you've patiently waited for the

Submitted by alicesneary on Wed, 11/03/2010 - 11:26pm
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LITA Online Course on mashups and APIs, coming in November

November 15-19 I'm co-teaching an online course with Jason Clark on mashups and APIs. The class, which is being offered by LITA, will cover lots of different Web services out there for libraries and library developers to use. The class is meant for people who are just starting out and are curious to learn more--people who may have heard about Web Services and now want to build their knowledge and abilities from the ground up. Know someone like this? Invite them! Or it could be a good refresher course for more seasoned staff, too. We'll start simple by defining mashups and APIs. There will be lots of examples about what's been done and what's possible. Participants will see some low-fi API and widgets including nifty things that can be accomplished with WorldCat lists and widgets, Google Spreadsheet API and Yahoo Pipes. You'll get a whole session on APIs for bibliographic data, too. You'll hear me cover many of the OCLC Web services (surprise!) including the WorldCat Search API, xIdentifier Services, and WorldCat Identities. Last but not least, you'll learn about about geolocation, news and media APIs, too. There will be lecture portions, but you'll also get lots of code examples and time for discussion. If you have been looking for a more focused and hands-on learning experience with mashups and APIs--but haven't been able to attend a WorldCat Mashathon--then this course is for you. Thanks to LITA for sponsoring the session, and asking me to teach it with the "help build the library developer community" hat on for OCLC. I have learned so much from other people--and now am glad to share my learning. Note there is a fee for the course, and you can register for it on the LITA Web site.
Submitted by librarywebchic on Wed, 10/27/2010 - 7:58am
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Friday Office hours come to the Developer Network

Remember back in your undergraduate days, when professors would host office hours? You could go in and visit, ask questions, talk story and generally work on projects together. Well now Office Hours are officially coming to the OCLC Developer Network. Come chat (virtually) with Karen on Fridays in November and ask questions, get help and generally just talk about Web Services or library-developer related topics from 3:00pm - 5:00pm ET (12 noon to 2:00 pm PT). November dates include:
  • 5 November 2010
  • 12 November 2010
  • 19 November 2010
You'll see the chat window or link on the Developer Network home page when Office Hours are happening. If there is interest, we will explore making additional hours available for European developers, too.
Submitted by alicesneary on Mon, 10/25/2010 - 3:25pm
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Recent enhancements made to the WorldCat Search API

All you Developer Network listserv watchers--which I assume is most of you--you will already have heard this news about the WorldCat Search API. But for the rest of us, just in case you missed it when it went out in September... For the record, the WorldCat Search API was enhanced to make a few updates and corrections. Here's the list: 1) The LCCN provided in the RSS and Atom formats now works correctly for all LCCNs including those with one or two character prefixes.

Submitted by alicesneary on Tue, 10/19/2010 - 2:31pm
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QR Code Hacks

A lightning talk on QR codes at Access last week reminded me that just prior to the Boston Mashathon I did a nifty mashup using the RSS feed from the Developer Network Application Gallery and the Google Chart API. I wanted to mass generate QR Codes for all the web addresses of the applications in the Application Gallery to put them in attendee's badges at the Boston Mashathon. I found a QR code generate where I could perform this task one by one. However, I wanted something way more efficient since there are now over 60 applications in the gallery. I discovered that the Google Chart API has a way to generate QR codes easily. The next thing I needed was a way to get the URLs for all the applications out of the Application gallery so I could easily loop through it and build QR codes. Drupal has a dead easy way to do this. You just use Views to create an RSS feed that includes all the applications. The feed will have the name of the application as the Title and the url in the Link element. Once I had the feed I could use a PHP script to parse it and build the code on the fly. The result was a tabular web page that listed all the application names and their QR code. Saving the page and all its accompanying files to my hard drive gave me all the QR code images. You can see below that the code for producing the QR codes is pretty simple. I could have also written the PHP to just download the image files using curl to a folder on my hard drive but this approach was simpler and also let me display the codes in a web page to check to make sure they were being properly created. If you want to see the page in action you can check in out at http://www.librarywebchic.net/mashups/QR_code_page.php . Be patient the QR codes take a bit of time to load. This demo shows just how easy it is to use data from an RSS feed to produce QR codes. I can imagine a library potentially sending out a New Books list brochure that uses QR codes to link readers of the brochure back to information about a specific book and allow them to place a hold for that book.
Submitted by librarywebchic on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 5:38pm
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New demos for Access presentation

I'm presenting on OCLC Web Services at Access this week and I wanted to have some new stuff to show off at the conference. As a result, I wrote two new demos which show off OCLC Web Services and other APIs. One demo is an extension of the code I wrote at the Boston Mashathon.

Submitted by librarywebchic on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 8:54am
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Developer Network hangs out at Access

Roy, Ralph and I traveled to Winnipeg for the Access conference this week. We all participated in the Hackfest and Ralph and I are presenting. My talk is on how OCLC Web Services can be used to improve library UIs. Ralph is giving a talk on the OCLC open source Linked Data framework that powers are services like VIAF. We're having a great time a the conference so far. We helped build cool things at the Hackfest. I worked on a project in which I had to take data from Solr and create charts with it using the Google Chart API. Roy helped with a project called "Mobile Death Hack". You can check out the prototype at http://mobiledeath.wallandbinkley.com/ . I had some favorite presentations from the first day of the conference as well. These included Dan Scott's talk on Standard Social Sharing and Aggregation on the Go, was also good and gave me new standards to check out and learn about. Today will be more great presentations and the rest of the Hackfest reports. I'm looking forward to seeing what folks have to show off and learning about interesting projects which libraries are doing.
Submitted by librarywebchic on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 8:34am
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EZproxy version 5.3 now available

While EZproxy isn't a Web service, a lot of developers/Web people are also tasked with maintaining the library's authentication servers. Thus, we always want to let you know the latest and greatest with identity management, authentication and authorization services. So the latest version, 5.3 is now available on OCLC.org. Here are the details about the enhancements:
  • A new function, Length, returns the number of characters in a string. This functionality is helpful in complex user.txt configurations for verifying and parsing strings. See an example from the official announcement.
  • EZproxy V5.3 now supports the latest Shibboleth Version 2.1 Identity Providers (IdPs) for authentication. This move expands the number of Shibboleth IdPs available to an even wider range--all IdPs from V1.3 forward are now supported.
  • A new option, Option CookiePassThrough, passes ALL cookies through EZproxy to the user's browser. Adding this option provides wider flexibility for the service to work with additional Web sites that may require a cookie to be set.
  • LOGFORMAT now returns the correct number of bytes transferred for https connections. This correction will help libraries more accurately track usage statistics for EZproxy-enabled sessions.
  • There were a number of additional minor fixes to improve the overall stability of EZproxy.
See the full list of changes Upgrade to 5.3 Also note two things:
  1. a hosted version of EZproxy is in pilot and the reports back from libraries using it are quite good. So stay tuned to hear more when hosted EZproxy is ready for production in your library...
  2. As soon as testing is complete, version 5.3.1 will come out that supports NCIP authentication even more fully than v5.3 does today.
Submitted by alicesneary on Wed, 10/13/2010 - 12:40pm
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Boston Mashathon wrap up coming soon

WorldCat Mashathon Boston group photoWow, hard to believe it's been a week since the Mashathon in Boston. Time flies when you're busy mashing. Or coding.

Submitted by alicesneary on Thu, 09/30/2010 - 9:11am
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