News

This past weekend several enhancements were made to the WorldCat Search API. This included:

Last week the Developer Network and Liverpool John Moores University hosted a WorldCat Mashathon in Liverpool at Parr St Studios in conjunction with the Liver & Mash Mashed Libraries event. The event was attended by 28 participants from a variety of libraries and OCLC UK. Photo by Bruce Washburn on Flickr The mashathon had a great deal of discuss about the various web services. Because of participant interest, I ended up talking about several newer services which we hadn't planned on covering. Dewey.info which is the top three levels of the Dewey Classification system as Linked Data and VIAF.org (Virtual International Authority File) which brings together authority data from libraries several national libraries around the world, were both of interest. As was the QuestionPoint Knowledge base web service. One day mashathons are always harder on the participants because there is less time to create functional code. Still we had two participants who were able to generate some basic code. George Bingham from the OCLC UK OLIB team, used WorldCat Identities to enhance the authority list display in the OLIB OPAC. Both by linking from the authority screen to Identities and by incorporating information from Identities into the authority screen. John Salter from the University of Leeds, used the xISBN service to find various editions of a book to place into their Reading List system. Using xISBN he could indicate in a reading list that a newer addition of the book existed and could be ordered. In addition, my colleague Bruce Washburn was able to spend some time working on his "Wise Guy" app for Android phones. Wise Guy uses the relatively new QuestionPoint Knowledge base web service. The app takes a term and finds a random question and answer pair within the QuestionPoint Knowledge base which match the term. Other mashathon participants kicked around ideas for applications but didn't complete writing code. In particular Julian Cheal from UKOLN had idea of mashing up date from WorldCat Search API, and Netflix to provide access to movies with a particular actor or actress which was quite interesting.

Fortunately, people have been hard at work figuring out new apps and mashups with OCLC Web Services and WorldCat.org links. I've just been slow to get them out to you! But now there are twelve--count them, twelve--new apps in the OCLC Application Gallery ( in no particular order):

Nothing like short notice. Sorry, this event has been on my calendar for weeks now and I'd meant to blog about it ages ago. But...for those of you impromptu, spur-of-the-moment, I'm free-for-the-next-hour-why-not types, our own Bruce Washburn is giving a Webinar on Mobile Development today in 35 minutes. A free Webinar and part of the OCLC Research TAI CHI (Technical Advances for Innovation in Cultural Heritage Institutions) series, you can sign up from the news announcement lnked above. But never fear, if you only check your feedreader at night--the Webinar will be recorded and made available in the iTunes store for replay later.