New York Times Mashups

Every since the New York Times posted about a mashup done with their Best Seller API and WorldCat, I've been itching to try out my own versions. So I've built two mashups:

• one adds New York Times Best Seller indicators to a catalog full records created from the WorldCat Search API
• the second builds a feed for a selected NYT Bestseller list and a particular library. If the library has the book then the link field goes to the library if not it goes to WorldCat.

You can see a screenshot of the simple full records screen I've created below.
What's cool about the NYT Bestseller API is that you can search to see if something was a Bestseller. You can get which best seller list it was on and for how long as well as links to reviews of the book in the New York Times. As you can see, I'm using all of this in my mashup. The second mashup has been the more challenging of the two for several reasons. First, I wanted to use the Registry to get the library's information (Name, Web address) to use in the feed I'm generating. Second, I'm obsessive and wanted to build catalog links to OCLCNumber rather than ISBNs. Why? Because in many catalog ISBN doesn't retrieve one and only one record and so it doesn't take you to THE record for the book. So I'm using xISBN to retrieve an OCLCNumber then doing a search on the WorldCat Search API using OCLCNumber and OCLCSymbol. The last thing that makes the mashup difficult is the fact that I decided to create an Atom feed and I was having some issues with encoding entities like &. Its down now and you can see the final product here. Put in an OCLC Symbol and select the best seller list you want. Have patience the script is slow because it has to make multiple calls to the WorldCat Search API, one for each book on the best seller list. I'd love to find a way to make it faster but this is the best I can do right now.