WorldCat Mashathon Boston 2010 Show and Tell
Well 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 videos and wrap up from the event. We had about 35 attendees come from all over Boston, Cambridge and the surrounding area. Peter Kiraly of eXtensible Catalog Organization wins the award for most patience and furthest traveler. Coming over from Hungary, his flight was delayed for something like 18 hours...but he made it on the second day and made some very important contributions in terms of eXtensible catalog Drupal Toolkit modules for a Dewey Decimal Classification number translator and the journal history tracker. Roy shot the videos in HD--big improvement over my little point-and-shoot camera of previous mashathons. But note to self: the videos show the presenters but not the screen. So you'll hear about the projects and we've included links when possible...I know there were other people, like Graeme, working on projects but didn't get a chance to show their work. You might see those projects appear in the app gallery, eventually. But here's the eight that we did get a chance to see, in the order they were presented: Barcode Scanner This group built a barcode scanner into an Android app, so that incoming books could get sorted automatically by whether they had cataloging available. It uses the WorldCat Search API to match ISBNs with titles and build an XML file on the server that can then speed the process along. Brice built a Sinatra app on Ruby through Heroku to check the records and then download the file. Peter Green, Princeton Brice Stacey, UMass Boston Bruce Washburn, OCLC Research WorldCat Identities Timeline Karen mashed the MIT simile timeline with WorldCat Identities to show all the titles by a particular author or writer. It takes you back to WorldCat.org to find the title. Karen eventually got her prototype completed with book covers and summaries. Check it out on her Web site. Karen Coombs, OCLC WorldCat Identities into Wikipedia links Roy wants to embed more external links to WorldCat Identities records on Wikipedia pages, semi-automatically. He used DBpedia and describes some of the challenges he had to overcome with this approach. Roy Tennant, OCLC Research AppMakr Even though she says she's not a developer, Nicole built some nifty iPhone apps with WorldCat list RSS feeds, university news, video tutorials, and flickr feeds through an online tool called appmakr. She did a cool feed about Doc Edgerton that mashes up many of the above sources. Nicole Henning, MIT Fixing catalog problems with command line code Paul worked on stripping out ISBNs that weren't right and reloading them with ISBNs that were proper via the xISBN service. The video got messed up for this one, unfortunately. Paul Hoffman, Fenway Libraries Online Timeline and WorldCat Identities Another Simile timeline that mashes WorldCat Identities data. Pete started wondering about Nobel prizes, to see if prize-winners did published work that was then recognized, or if their prize status helped them publish more articles. He talks through the technology behind mash-up, too. Pete Ciuffetti, Credo Reference, Ltd Mobile-friendly Web app Michael built a great app on the Grails platform that pulled back WorldCat Search API results, limited by his institution. He took the ISBN and got bookcovers when possible. Michael Vandermillen, Harvard Feed Me Some Lyrics Wendy explains the music finder she, Chelsea and Giovanni built that takes a lyrics snippet and returns suggested matches on song title, lyrics, performers and even guitar tabs and includes results from WorldCat for where to find the item. It uses the chart lyrics API and the WorldCat Search API. Wendy Bossons, MIT Chelsea Lobdell, Swarthmore College Giovanni De Milia, Astrophysics Data System, Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Last but not least, we ran out of time for Graeme Williams to show what he'd been working on. He's our superpatron for WorldCat and developed these two items, too: Find related ISBNs Graeme's mash-up that uses xISBN to find related books and then checks the Minuteman Catalog for availability. Add OCLC item to a user's list This mash-up logs into Graeme's WorldCat account and adds an item to the test list based on its OCLC number. You can add to his list, too. Pretty nifty. Can't wait to see these apps and more in finished form in the Developer Network app gallery! And of course, looking forward to the next mashathon. Which is planned to be a little different next time, so that more people can participate...stay tuned!