A Quick Post-mesh Post
As mentioned previously, members of the web team attended the recent mesh conference and found it quite valuable. I was expecting to be somewhat out of place as a librarian (albeit a "web" librarian) but the great strength of the conference was the diversity of voices and perspectives. I got many insights into potential directions for library web services that I'm not sure I would otherwise have found. A part of this was just talking to tech-savvy people who still thought of the library as "books only" (not that this isn't still a big part of our identity!) and thinking as a result about how we might make our web presence better known–I'm hoping at least a few of them will start using Safari Computer Bookshelf or some of our other tech-focused resources (we have a ton of electronic journals and magazines dealing with computer science, information technology and technology in general available with your library card through our website). Thanks to everyone I met at #mesh09 who shared ideas and thoughts with me.
I wanted to quote (perhaps paraphrase) two lines from Mayor Miller's second-day keynote, where he discussed plans for opening up city data and using web services to improve civic life that I thought were of especial relevance to the library's own efforts:
- "When we share our information and open up our data, individuals will create new applications that benefit both the community and the city."
- "In the future, systems can be redesigned to ensure they are open."
We have written previously on "Toronto 2.0" and our vision of the library's place in it and our efforts to open up our own data. Major attention is being paid as part of our ongoing redesign of the library's web presence to changing the "underlying" model and structure of our data to make it more open, both to improve our own ability to build interesting and helpful web services in the future, and to enlist the ideas and skills of the community in adding value to our data, like the Red Rocket iPhone application has done with data shared by the Toronto Transit Commission.
So we are on board here at the web team with the vision of a more open city (the library is a city service, though we report to an arms-length board rather than to the city directly), and hope to make some pretty exciting announcements relatively soon about our own data-sharing. Watch this space! 🙂
10 thoughts on “A Quick Post-mesh Post”
I love TPL, and I use the Safari Bookshelf. It is fantastic! I try to spread the word about it to as many people as possible. But, did you know that pagination still does not work in your version of Safari? You can never see more than the first 50 books of any subset. It reverts to the main recordset from page 2+. I’ve talked to library staff who are responsible for this product, but so far to no avail. It is very distressing to see this every time I use it.
I love TPL, and I use the Safari Bookshelf. It is fantastic! I try to spread the word about it to as many people as possible. But, did you know that pagination still does not work in your version of Safari? You can never see more than the first 50 books of any subset. It reverts to the main recordset from page 2+. I’ve talked to library staff who are responsible for this product, but so far to no avail. It is very distressing to see this every time I use it.
Hi Adam,
The complicated nature of licensed database access can sometimes lead to these frustrations and we do try to fix what we can on our side whenever possible.
I’ll forward your comment on to the staff responsible for Safari Bookshelf. I use it almost daily myself, so I can understand the problem of it not quite working right.
Thanks for the feedback.
Hi Adam,
The complicated nature of licensed database access can sometimes lead to these frustrations and we do try to fix what we can on our side whenever possible.
I’ll forward your comment on to the staff responsible for Safari Bookshelf. I use it almost daily myself, so I can understand the problem of it not quite working right.
Thanks for the feedback.
Speaking of open access, I’d really like to fill in the blank spot in the above screenshot.
So far I’ve been using Charles Web Debugging Proxy to analyse how the library catalogue currently works. And while I’ve managed to get a basic login system going, it’s not as much fun as the old system’s GetXML=true.
What I’d really like to do is have a chat with the web team about how they could improve the site output for speed (for starters, see O’Reilly’s High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers, use external files for all CSS and JS, use image sprites, etc.) and I’d love to chat with someone about an API implementation and/or share my own, once I get it going. The real problem with web scraping an API together is testing it against all possible web responses. For instance, what output should I look for when the site is down for maintenance, or when a session times out? How can I optimize the API to reduce load on the servers, or better yet, would it be possible to get a push notification for borrowers who’ve signed up for such, so that as new holds become available, for instance, it gets pushed to the iPhone application automatically?
I really want to make the best application for the iPhone and iPod touch, not just because I love and use the library all the time and it would help me, but because of how unpopular it is with the tech crowd.
I was at a Microsoft conference in 2007 when Vista had just been released, and it was on designing widgets for the sidebar. In a group of six, we were to make a widget in a few hours. We had to first decide on a widget idea. I suggested a Toronto Public Library widget, and the responses shocked me: “Who cares about that?” said one, and the rest were similarly uninterested. But for me, I’ve always felt that books deserved the same treatment as movies and music. You’ve a first-class iTunes store for music, and Flixter for looking up the latest movies, but what have you for books? At most right now there’s amazon.ca, but that’s just not local enough for me. (Besides, if I wanted to buy online, I’d buy an ebook for my Sony PRS-700, but getting books from the TPL for that device is a whole other story.)
Anyway, I’d love to hear from people about this. My email’s LSTA at yorku dot ca, or you can phone me at 647-801-LSTA (5782).
Thanks and have a great day,
Louis St-Amour,
Digital Media student at York University
(and avid book- and podcast-lover. Which reminds me, the library doesn’t promote podcasts enough. And its internet fact sheets near reference desks uses Apple’s podcast logo, which always confuses me.)
P.S. Fix the blog comment spacing. In https://blogs.tpl.ca/webteam/styles.css on line 319, it says .comment-content { white-space: pre-wrap; } Remove the white-space: pre-wrap, because the blog right now outputs p and such perfectly, so there’s no need to treat the output like plain text, preserving line breaks in the output as line breaks on screen.
Speaking of open access, I’d really like to fill in the blank spot in the above screenshot.
So far I’ve been using Charles Web Debugging Proxy to analyse how the library catalogue currently works. And while I’ve managed to get a basic login system going, it’s not as much fun as the old system’s GetXML=true.
What I’d really like to do is have a chat with the web team about how they could improve the site output for speed (for starters, see O’Reilly’s High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers, use external files for all CSS and JS, use image sprites, etc.) and I’d love to chat with someone about an API implementation and/or share my own, once I get it going. The real problem with web scraping an API together is testing it against all possible web responses. For instance, what output should I look for when the site is down for maintenance, or when a session times out? How can I optimize the API to reduce load on the servers, or better yet, would it be possible to get a push notification for borrowers who’ve signed up for such, so that as new holds become available, for instance, it gets pushed to the iPhone application automatically?
I really want to make the best application for the iPhone and iPod touch, not just because I love and use the library all the time and it would help me, but because of how unpopular it is with the tech crowd.
I was at a Microsoft conference in 2007 when Vista had just been released, and it was on designing widgets for the sidebar. In a group of six, we were to make a widget in a few hours. We had to first decide on a widget idea. I suggested a Toronto Public Library widget, and the responses shocked me: “Who cares about that?” said one, and the rest were similarly uninterested. But for me, I’ve always felt that books deserved the same treatment as movies and music. You’ve a first-class iTunes store for music, and Flixter for looking up the latest movies, but what have you for books? At most right now there’s amazon.ca, but that’s just not local enough for me. (Besides, if I wanted to buy online, I’d buy an ebook for my Sony PRS-700, but getting books from the TPL for that device is a whole other story.)
Anyway, I’d love to hear from people about this. My email’s LSTA at yorku dot ca, or you can phone me at 647-801-LSTA (5782).
Thanks and have a great day,
Louis St-Amour,
Digital Media student at York University
(and avid book- and podcast-lover. Which reminds me, the library doesn’t promote podcasts enough. And its internet fact sheets near reference desks uses Apple’s podcast logo, which always confuses me.)
P.S. Fix the blog comment spacing. In https://blogs.tpl.ca/webteam/styles.css on line 319, it says .comment-content { white-space: pre-wrap; } Remove the white-space: pre-wrap, because the blog right now outputs <p> and such perfectly, so there’s no need to treat the output like plain text, preserving line breaks in the output as line breaks on screen.
Hi Louis!
We’ve fixed the comment spacing so thanks for the css tip, it was driving me crazy.
Lots of great comments and suggestions – we’ll be in touch.
Cheers,
Dara
Hi Louis!
We’ve fixed the comment spacing so thanks for the css tip, it was driving me crazy.
Lots of great comments and suggestions – we’ll be in touch.
Cheers,
Dara
I just found the Safari Computer Bookshelf! It’s great! I’ll be using this resource more often.
I just found the Safari Computer Bookshelf! It’s great! I’ll be using this resource more often.