Nothing new, but could be quicker (Library 2.0 – idea #6)
It’s nothing new, to create a list of titles that you want to highlight and publish them on a web page (my latest effort). But it took me a while (not sure how long exactly, because other things always crop up).
What if I could just hand a list of ISBNs to my OPAC’s API to retrieve a list of works with titles, images, clickable links into the catalogue? I could use javascript to make the call (reusable, simply substitute the ISBN list). The API returning a simple xhtml unorderd list with ample class and id attributes, I could create a style sheet to fit my corporate style (created once – used many times) and that would be it. I could leave the gathering of images and the construction of the openUrl link to the script.
I could even have the script and stylesheet as a template, built into part of a script that fetches the top 15 requests for a month (run monthly from cron), and ftps them to our web server.
Better still, would be the OPAC that comes with a set of easily digestable data widgets (i.e. top 10 issued items this month, top 10 requested items… etc.) that I could activate with a click, specify when they should update, and then drop a javascript fragment into my own page to show the results. Much as Furl do with their javascript tools for displaying your archive on your own pages.
Technorati Tags: Library 2.0, OPAC, library catalogue, data extraction