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Aggregator Overload - Good Stuff - Some Explored - Some Not
Wednesday, January 08, 2003Six forms of navigation. Peter-Paul Koch writes about common forms of navigation that are used on websites, their strengths and weaknesses. He has identified three main types: Linear navigation Hierarchical navigation Web navigation And three subtypes: Breadcrumb navigation Sitemap Text navigation... [Column Two]
More on Jon Udell's LibraryLookup Bookmarklet.
An update on Jon Udell's LibraryLookup project to create bookmarklets for searching Innovative catalogs. It totally rocks!
Jon has added a couple of screenshots to help illustrate what the bookmarklets actually do. There are 900 libraries listed on the page now! Phil Windley, the Utah's CIO (for a little while longer, anyway), is already highlighting its use for Salt Lake City Public Library.
Of course, the next question is can this be done with other ILS vendor catalogs. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about this stuff to answer that question, but I have to think the answer is yes. As Jon said in an email, "This feels HUGE to me. A Web service that could be useful to millions of people, *deployed on a blog page*. Wonders never cease..." Major ditto on that one!
I'm also still thinking about library catalog toolbars that can be installed within the browser (much like Google's toolbar). What if a patron could download a library's toolbar for direct searching of the OPAC, and it included Jon's LibraryLookup bookmarklet with it? How can I make this a reality for SWAN?
Of course, from there, we could start combining library reference portal projects and start our own librarian pagerank project for use within the toolbar. World domination - it's only a cilck away! Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
[The Shifted Librarian]OPAC Search by ISBN Bookmarklets Courtesy of Jon Udell!.
With hopes that Jon won't be mad at me, I'm quoting his entire post about LibraryLookup bookmarklets. I highlighted NOBLE's Innovative scripts back in February, which inspired me to make an identical title search bookmarklet for our SWAN catalog, but this is heading down a very exciting path!
"I love the Internet. I knew that posting yesterday's partial solution to the library lookup problem would prompt someone to prompt me to take the next step. Via Technorati this morning:
jon udell has created a neat tool for quickly checking libraries in north america for books by ISBN. all this needs is some geographic location data for each library, and a bookmarklet to parse an amazon URL for ISBN, and he'll have a wonderful tool allowing anyone to use amazon's recommendations to find books at local libraries. if you following the previous links, you'll discover that all of the required parts of this tool already exist. someone just needs to put them all together. [randomchaos]
I knew that a bookmarklet was part of the answer. The example given is Amazon-specific, so I generalized it to use a regexp that I've tested with Amazon, BN, isbn.nu, and All Consuming. The geographic piece was what was really bothering me. You'll laugh when you see the solution I came up with:
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/stories/2002/12/11/librarylookup.html
It's just a page of bookmarklets, one per library. Pick your library, drag it to the toolbar, and then hit the link when your current URL is book-related."
My only question is why aren't my SWAN libraries included in the list? :-(
[The Shifted Librarian]RFID Journal. Gillete to purchase 500 m RFIDs to tag products. Wow. Embedded Radio IDs are going mainstream. From my friend John Smart's Accelerating Times newsletter:
[John Robb's Radio Weblog]Powerful acceleration of this technology in the last year... A Hitachi chip small enough to place into paper money. Sub-ten cent chips, sub-$100 scanners. Transmission ranges up to 20 feet. MIT's Auto-ID center is busily building out a Local Positioning System (LPS) for everything.
Groovy underwater VR panoramas. Gorgeous underwater QTVR pano's. Navigate in a full circle, or vertically.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Jens!) [Boing Boing Blog]
Mac OS X 10.2 selected Product of the Year by a PC magazine. The Finnish IT magazine MikroPC has today published its traditional list of 'Products of the Year'. This time the winner of the category 'Software - Applications' was Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) by Apple. [Universal Rule]
Lorem Ipsum generator. I have just stumbled across a website offering a Lorem Ipsum generator. What is this? Well, it's the dummy text that you will often see in interface design mockups, and this website will generate as much of it as you... [Column Two]
Quit stuck programs without a visible Force Quit box: "You know that you can force quit frozen applications or games by pressing Apple (Command) plus Option plus Escape, and the Force Quit window will show up, allowing you to force quit the frozen application. But in some frozen applications and games, the Force Quit window won't show up. It makes you think the whole system has crashed. Most of the times, though, it hasn't. [...] Here is what you do before you press reset button; hold down Apple (Command) and Option and Escape, then just hit Enter. You might have to hit Enter twice in some crashes." [Mac OS X Hints] [Universal Rule]
Dantz Retrospect 5.0.238 (Update - 11/09/2002), Advanced backup software [dws.]
Portals, Blogs, & RSS: why they are your future. A slide presentation on the above topic... [via David Carter-Tod] [Seblogging News]