Middlemash - 30 Nov

To be honest I was a little apprehensive about attending Middlemash as I was worried it would be very "techie". But having followed the previous mashed librares event on Twitter earlier this year I was keen to go and find out more. As it turned out I needn't have worried there were a good range of people there, I didn't feel out of my depth and a real range of topics and projects were covered.

The morning started with a series of short talks (slides from some of the presentations are on Slideshare:

EL Open Platform Program (Tamar Sadeh)
The Open Platform Program is an initiative from Ex Libris (who also sponsored the day) to encourage customers to extend their products. They are doing this using OPen Interfaces such as APIs, plug ins (e.g. Amazon in Primo), adapters (which connect 2 systems), deeplinks and views (new interface for an existing database).

Rapid Design - Mark van Harmelen
Mark explained techniques for involving users in the design process of systems and new developments. He said that users should be involved from an early stage in the design process and showed various techniques to enable quick design and testing. This included paper prototyping so you could represent a user interface using paper which users can then work with to show the processes incolved in using the system and figure out problems before a system is built. Machine prototyping can reveal things that paper can't especially with repetitive processes. There are a number of programs which can be helpful in the design process including Balsamiq and Photoshop.

Mashing Reading Lists - Edith Spellman
Edith had used Yahoo Pipes to address a problem with reading list at Trinity College of Music being too static and becoming out of date. The pipe she set up examines the current reading list, extracts key terms and then uses these terms to suggest searches in a relevant database (had used RLIM). This wasn't yet a live service but Edith was presenting it to academics the week after Middlemash. Other ideas which Tony Hirst had for using Yahoo Pipes and reading lists was using the ISBn to look up Amazon recommendations, and using the Mosaic API use the ISBN to look up courses of people who have also borrowed that book and then use the course codes to what other books those people have borrowed.

We're currently looking at adding search boxes for our e-Library and catalogue to our VLE and I'm wondering if we might be able to do something similar to this to adapt the searching to particular courses. Something to look in to.

Discovery Layer & Next Gen Catalogues - Chris Keene
Chris talked about NGCs in general and Aquabrowser at Uni of Sussex. One NGC I'd not heard of before is Bibliocommons - unfortunately there's not much on their website so still don't know much more. The talk touched on issues to be considered when looking at a new catalogue - being able to search across everything is good but people still want to be able to search subsets so need to think about what's useful for users.

Sussex have implemented Aquabrowser and Chris covered their experience - a few points:
* They'd tried out the MyDiscoveries (tagging, reviews etc) add on and found it hadn't worked for them so had dropped it.
* Theu've added on Metalib searching to Aquabrowser so ML is getting a lot more hits (need to make sure ML can cope!)
* Problems had surfaced with users having to go back to their old interface (Prism 2) to renew books, place ILL requests and reservatioan - no solution as yet but he suggested that Primo and VUfind had made moves towards better intrgration in those areas (someone also commented that LSE's implementation of VUfind had relatively low take up until they implemented my account functionality).

Refworks to create new title lists - Paul Stainthorp
Another use for Yahoo Pipes, the University of Lincoln have started recording new titles in Refworks (entered by subject librarians) , with a separate folder for each subject, and then using Yahoo Pipes to clean up the RSS feed from Refworks and add bits like book covers, links to lookup the book on other systems like Google books & their catalogue. They also put the feed through Feedburner so that staff can get email alerts. All academic staff are signed up to the alerts so they are notified whenever a new book from their subject area is made avaialble. Paul also mentioned Feed2JS which translates RSS to JavaScript so that it can be embedded in a web page. There's more info on their staff blog.

Whilst I don't think the same process would work here (would generate more work) it did make me wonder how much we do to promote the new resources we buy here and if we could do something similar. I'm sure I've seen examples of people pulling lists of new items off Talis and displaying it in a web page. Another one to look into.

One more idea for using Yahoo PIpes came up in the afternoon (I'm afraid I can't remember who came up with this) was using it with xISBN to check for new editions of books on reading lists. I don't know enough about xISBN to know how well thsi would work but sounds like it could be useful to alert staff to new editions.

Afternoon ...
Following lunch, we broke into 3 different groups - I would have liked to attend all the sessions but chose to go to the Juice session run by Richard Wallis as this was something I'd already been looking at. The other sessions were Yahoo Pipes and creating library floor plans.

Juice uses JavaScript to add extensions to OPACS and any other web interface/ site. The session was useful as Richard went through in detail how it wokrs and what each of the files do but unfortunately as I didn't have access to our Prism server from off campus I couldn't do any testing in the session (unlike other people who managed to get Juice working on their test sites whilst Richard was talking). Soemone also managed to adapt the Amazon extension so that it should work with Syndetics - something else to test.

The day finished with tea and cakes and more time to chat and see what other people had got up to in the afternoon.