librarything on our catalogue

As mentioned yesterday, here are a couple of screenshots of what it would look like if we had descriptive tags from LibraryThing added to each title on our library catalogue. Click on the images to see a larger version.

1) Do a search on the catalogue, as normal, and click on a title to open that record.

This is what you'd see; take a look at the orange tags appearing in the right-hand sidebar.

2) 'fables', you think, hmm, what else have we got by way of fables? So you click on the 'fables' tag, and a new window

opens:

3) Now, you can either click on any of the tags on the left to do more exploring by tag, or click on any of the titles on the right, to open that record and see what Manukau holds. And now that the tags are scoped, all of the titles appearing on the right should have at least one Manukau holding.

some finds from rss

Just pulling in my rss lines to see what's biting, and found a couple of articles to think about later on... in my copious spare time...

'Make your own headlines' includes a comparison chart of various big rss reader sites, which compares features of Bloglines and others.

What I Learned Today has a write-up on a talk about combining rss and javascript to create dynamic subject pages on your library website - the article also contains a link to the presentation itself, along with tools, slides and handouts. I love the way library people love to share information. "Why not use some of the tools mentioned to create a dynamic page that pulls news, journal updates, and new books from RSS feeds?" Sounds pretty cool. I'm sure we could think of some use for those kind of tools.

We got some great news today - there's an eLGAR project looking at adding LibraryThing tags into the OPAC, which didn't go ahead earlier on account of the tags being unscoped (and the catalogue being scoped), which lead to the situation where anything interesting you clicked on was likely held by Auckland or North Shore, but not usually by Manukau. Well, they've recreated the trial on the test server, in a scoped version, so anything you see should be held by us. Yay! For those who don't get to see the trial, what this means is that when you do a search on the catalogue, a little cloud of 'tags' appear in the right-hand sidebar of the screen next to each title you look at - these tags might, for example, be things like 'mystery', 'cat-lovers', 'funny story', 'ceramics'... any way that regular people have chosen to describe a particular book, basically. The idea being that it's kind of like people off the street have catalogued your book's subjects, using language non-cataloguers might use. You can then click on any of those tags to see what else we've got that falls into that category. I'll put up a screenshot tomorrow so you can see what it might look like.