Information Takes Over

Libraries do of course like to group things together into collections and make sure that like is with like. So it comes as no surprise to see that Bradford Metropolitan Borough Council Libraries have been doing just that…

While walking round the Business park, some time ago now, Richard and I got to talking about enquiries that you get in libraries from the great unwashed book reading public.   One I mentioned was the classic:

“I borrowed a book three months ago.  I can’t remember who wrote it or what it was called, but it was blue.”

So we got to thinking about how you could construct a search in a modern online catalogue to help with this query.  And that is how www.colourphon.co.uk was born.

We are building what will become a service, to take an image and return the most frequent colours in both a human readable and machine readable form.  If you have a look at the example links below, you will see results of our weighted ’scan’.  This analysis attempts to add weight to colours that it finds most frequently toward the centre of the image.

Need an example?  These examples will take a moment or two to calculate…

Try this one: Test number one. An ISBN lookup.
This one: Test number two. A Weigted URL
Or this one: Test number three. Another URL

Thought provoking? We’d welcome your comments over on the colourphon blog.

I have recently treated myself to a slighty more modern phone, and have been revisiting avenues that I went down with the old one before hitting big red technological walls.

Today I have been having another look at QR-codes, and the reader that you can download to your phone.

Why not generate them for your library? It could be a very simple impementation,

• Encode a link (URL) for each subject area (class search maybe) that you have and place them around the library (there is the small caveat that your online catalogue should render readably on a small screen device ).
• Or perhaps have an encoded phone number printed on the datelabel, so that people on trains who suddenly realise their book is overdue can renew by phone. (Not limited to trains of course!)
• Or add them to the bottom of all your posters so that there is a web page offerring more event information or competition entry details.

This is SO easy, and you can make a mobile users life more interesting!

Tell me if you are doing this already?

I notice with enthusiasm, that the Talis Platform Bigfoot API documentation has been released.

Must clear my schedule… now, where’s my text editor…

“As I see it, in the world of the library management system, amidst the turmoil of takeover and merger, the only constant is the fact that experimentation is free.”

That’s what I started to write in this post, but then I thought, actually no it isn’t.

I was originally thinking along these lines after a conversation I had with Richard Wallis from Talis while marching back to the station last thursday. I was aking about the practicalities of creating a Herefordshire specific union catalogue based on the Talis Platform. The upshot was that I could experiment, but then at the point when the service went live, there would probably be a cost. Therefore experimentation is free.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not getting all petulant that I can’t have totally free stuff. It’s just that I realised that in my excitement I was getting carried away on the experimenting part and forgetting the service delivery and maintenance part.  Both very important in the planning stages!

But why change my mind and decide that experimentation is not free?

Experimentation - in the web 2.0 world - is not free. The code may be freely available, and the APIs may be openly accessable, and the data may be sitting there waiting to be openly mashed, but, when you think carefully about what is happenning, you see the strings.

Let’s deal with some specifics…

1. The code is free, but you need to understand the code. I forget the amount of times when I have downloaded a toolkit to have a look-see; and thought it beyond me. I’m not a programmer, I am a tweaker. I know what I want to achieve, and I can usually get there if I have a good body of code and some examples to tweak.
2. But I have only so many hours in the day. Time - isn’t free. I have bills to pay, and a job to pay them with, but that doesn’t leave a huge amount of time if I want to have a social life too.
3. There are also usage strings attached. Yes you can use Amazon jacket images in your site, but only so long as they point back to Amazon.
4. Finally, there is the cost of moving from experimentation to live service. You need to maintain the code, the API calls may change. The API may vanish, or no longer be supported. The licensing may change.

Perhaps I shoud say “experimentation is low cost“.  And it is that low cost prototyping that is going to allow us to feel our way towards the solutions that we crave.

Technorati Tags: library2.0, web2.0, talis, library, experiement, cost