The mixed up world of libraries

This week I haven't had much of an opportunity to look in to the assisgnments as much as I had hoped.

But Sunday was a first for me, as my partner is a big Iron Maiden fan and decided to introduce me to the world of webcasts from the Download festival. His computer is one that he built himself about 8 years ago and occasionally goes away and tinkers with it (now had 2 hard disk replacements). I was amazed that it successfully managed to run a live transmission with no jumping or interference. I would hate to think the server power required for mounting that kind of operation. The only interfence was a small click every 5 minutes or so.

But that aside, I have been briefly looking into mashups. To me the term relates more to the wave of song mixing that Napster was famous for before it relented and became legal, or even the occasional video on YouTube that has a different song overlaid. This was the first time that I had come across the term in relation to software, and I never imagined that it may be applicable to libraries.

I was amused at some of the examples given in the text and could easily imagine the use of Google Maps being merged with the Wish website to enable me to locate libraries I need to attend meetings at. I felt that the ambitious talking librarian service is something that looked better on paper than it did in practicality, but similar mergers of software can prove useful to libraries.

Here is a nice use of mashup to help users locate books from the OPAC, just scroll down to the map.

As a promotional tool Google Desktop got together with Talis to launch a competition "Mashing up the Library," there is an idea forum which is rather interesting.

Currently this is far beyond what I am capable off, but some time soon I will probably grab a nice cup of tea one evening and downloaded grease monkey, with a javascript book in hand and tech friend on MSN to shout help at.

I don't have time at the moment for these sort of things to tweek my curiosity!