Oh to have been a fly on the wall at the just-wrapped Mashup Camp - a fly safely high up on the wall, because a) I’m no programmer and would likely be in the way, and b) its ‘geek dating’ program - a frenetic dance of speed demos and the “law of two feet” - sounds downright dangerous.

But I would have loved to buzz with the buzz, because it’s clear that the proliferation of web applications and reusable APIs is causing an explosion of tinkering, playing, discovering. As Web 2.0 guru Dion Hinchcliffe puts it, The theory is that you can be much more valuable to the rest of the world if your software can be reused in unintended ways. In other words, don’t just provide a fully created end-product for one pre-intended use. Encourage others to use the good pieces of what you provide in new and innovative ways. And thus the torrent of new services cobbled together with bits of preexisting web services — some of which is tracked by Mashup Feed.

What can nontechnical endusers can expect from all this mashing? More customized information and the power that goes with that, as data feeds get mixed for real-time information on weather, parking, airfare, restaurants, skiing, and general calamity.

A glance at David Schorr’s Weather Bonk confirms, at once, that the Mission is the only somewhat warm place in SF, and the GG Bridge is flowing pretty well at the moment:

Looking for more monetizable information? Flyspy is planning to bring to you a 30-day overview of airfares:

But no matter how clever or useful the mashup, it’s only as good as its datafeeds. Another mashup service, Cheap Gas, looks great until you notice that the gas prices you’re being quoted, contributed by ‘anonymous’ (maybe Eddy from Texaco down the street), dated from last summer:

Such flashy inaccuracy is bound to make people who are in the business of reliable information — for example, librarians — nervous. Many mashups are anarchic sandboxes, and who knows what use your data will be put to or what company it will be keeping or to what ends it will be mashed (that’s the point).

As Tom Owad demonstrated a little while ago , pinpointing ’subversive’ (yet acquisitive) persons is as easy as mashing up Amazon’s Wishlists with Yahoo People Search with Google Maps. Here’s a map of readers hoping someone buys them a shiny new copy of Orwell’s 1984:

And that’s all *legal* — just imagine what our government is up to.

Nevertheless, the rise of APIs may save libraries from the rusty chains of closed-box ILS packages , and allow them to dream up a range of new community-oriented services. Certainly we should be glad that programmers plugged into the potential of libraries, such as the Superpatron, were doing the monster mashup this week.

Scanning mashupfeed’s indexes… here are some mashups that strike me as library-intriguing, with pasted descriptive blurbs (ie, I didn’t write ‘em, because I didn’t try ‘em all):

Using GoogleMaps API

• Blosh Blosh finds blogs mentioning locations and displays them on a map.
  
• Boston RSS Alley This map displays the locations of some of the companies and bloggers actively working with RSS in the Boston area.
• Find the Landmark Test your knowledge of US landmarks with interactive, timer-based Google Maps game.
• Flyr Search Flickr for geotagged photos and then plot them on a Google Map. Nice nested map-within-a-map.
• GeoWorldNews The latest worldwide stories from the Washington Post plotted on a Google Maps satellite image.
• Healthia Use the Healthia doctor search to find doctors the United States. 800,000 doctors listed.
• History Timeline Wiki A history plus geography wiki that allows readers to contribute items of historical interest and plot their locations. Initial dataset is US battles.
• Libraries411 Find public libraries in the US and Canada. Data for more than 20,000 libraries available.
• Maplandia Comprehensive searchable gazeteer based on Google Maps. Referenc guide has full world coverage.
• Placeopedia Geographically place Wikipedia articles on top of Google maps:

• Solar Eclipses This Google Map shows the path of solar eclipses across Earth’s surface.
• World Airport and Airspace Database Database of over 11,000 airfields and airports across the world.
• World Volcano Browser Displays volcanos of the world on a Google Map. Data from the Smithsonian Institution, Global Vulcanism Project
  

Amazon API

• Albumart.org Uses the Amazon API and an Ajax-style UI to retrieve CD/DVD covers from the Amazon catalog.
• O’Reilly Book Page Mashup of Backpack and Amazon.com APIs to generate Backpack pages with Amazon.com book data.

Flickr API

• flickr graph Social network visualization using Flickr API:

• Flickr Related Tag Browser Search and visualization tool that lets you surf Flickr’s tag space. Flickr tags are keywords used to classify images. Related tags shown based on clustered usage analysis.
  
• Flickrscape Enter a word and watch the flickr photo stream. Click to interrupt stream and try another word.
  
• geobloggers Google Maps + Flickr photos. It also consumes del.icio.us for geotagged bookmarks and the Upcoming.org for US events, which it then geocodes.
  

del.icio.us API

• Cloudalicious This nice graphing application shows you the count of del.icio.us tags applied to a given URL over time. Here’s the Romantic Audience Project so graphed:

• Delancey This nice del.icio.us enhancement allows you to see which of your del.icio.us bookmarks are used most frequently.
• thumblicious Use thumblicious to quickly preview the most popular sites bookmarked on del.icio.us via thumbnail screenshots.

Google API

• Copyscape A website plagiarism search tool that uses the Google Search API.
• DoubleTrust Shows the best search results from both Google and Yahoo in a new way. Also allows user to alter his trust in either engine to bais combined rankings.
• QTSaver Uses Google and Yahoo APIs to extract microcontent from multiple sites and allows you to rearrange the excerpts.
• SpellWeb Compares relative popularity of spellings or concepts based on web frequency. An experiment in sidesifting the Web for useful patterns of information:

You get the idea… you probably get a thousand ideas. That’s the problem with mashups — too many ideas, too many variously commercial or incomplete datastreams, too much sheer buzz. But quickly, perhaps within a fly’s lifespan, your library may truly catch on.

Check out what’s new at that flagship of Library 2.0-ness — the plugged-in to plug-ins, blessed by superpatrons, interactively inventive Ann Arbor District Library: card catalogs!

Remember card catalogs? If you do, you’ll remember that uniquely tactile experience: the sliding out, the flipping through, the red-ink-mandated cross referencing, the peering & copying & replacing. You remember the yellowing card musk, the little codes and numbers, the misaligned typing of some librarian in some back office on some rainy afternoon in 1943.

There the cards were, so vulnerable in their long drawers, just waiting in to be smudged by indifferent sticky fingers, scribbled across by any lunatic with an agenda, ripped out by any patron too lazy to copy down call numbers. Card catalog maintenance must have been a heck of a job, Brownie–and good riddance.

Yet cards are where the public touched the library, and maybe that’s why (shaking ourselves out of pre-OPAC reverie) we see the inventive John Blyberg, AADL’s lead developer, reviving catalog cards in a virtual setting. None of the fuss, none of the muss — and now you don’t have to feel bad about writing on the cards, or grabbing them for yourself.

Here’s a look — the AADL OPAC listing for a book on marginalia offers a link to a “Card catalog image” (near the top of the record):

Click the link, and here’s the generated card — bottom perforation and everything. Someone has already scrawled a message on the card: Defacement is subjective. You, or anyone, could add another scrawl by entering text in one of the three position fields and clicking on that very 2.0 button, Add your marginalia!:

For patrons with accounts, cards can be gathered into personal collections which can, in turn, be shared with other patrons:

Blyberg writes in his description of the project that it was “black-ops” — no committee, no proposal, no approval, no testing, no advertising, no muss no fuss — so it remains a bit murky and provisional. Marginalia on a given card seems limited to three entries. A book can have several cards associated with it, and it’s not immediately clear how to look through all those cards. Also, I’m not sure whether or how cards gathered into one’s own collection can be inscribed by others.

If virtual card catalogs are merely proof-of-concept at this point, the concept reminds me a bit of a project that the Alchemical Muser and others were working on at Columbia’s CCNMTL called Plone Stickies. These Stickies initially allowed students to attach short notes to digital objects — but the fuller vision for them, I believe, involves client-side keyword tagging and community sharing.

What do virtual catalog cards and these stickies have in common, besides a general yellowness? They both draw on the desire to physically connect to thought-objects. As such objects recede into a intangible, fungible environment, it’s notable that old means of tracking them — those flopping and curling and awkward apparatuses of identification — persist in collective memory, and expand into markers of collectivity.

Anyone looking for a snapshot of the way digital communication is accepted (or not) as a viable part of the traditional scholarly process should hie, forthwith, to Ulises Ali Mejias’s discussion on his Ideant blog: “The Blog as Dissertation Literature Review?” and a followup post.

Mejias is a doctoral candidate specializing in education and technology, so it’s quite understandable that he chooses to ponder the academic value of social software on his blog. And the payoff is vivid: he draws two critical comments from the authors of the article he most engages, “Scholars Before Researchers: On the Centrality of the Dissertation Literature Review in Research Preparation” (2005).

The argument is lively enough — mercifully light on eduspeak — and I won’t spill cyberink retracing it completely. Mejias thinks about the function of that fine old ground-clearing of dissertations, the literature review, and argues for the efficacy of doing it within the framework of a blog. Why? Blogs are dynamic, flexibly tended and amended, self-catagorizable, dynamic, widely accessible, and open to (please can’t this word die?) feedback. Moreover, bibliographic lists can be interlinked with critical assessments of their worth (as Mejias demonstrates).

The responses of the two authors of the study that Mejias cites throughout the post, a librarian and a professor, are fascinating.

The librarian deplores the slippage of standards — she seems most exercised that she was not properly cited in Mejias’s post, but she also airs concerns that a digital environment is too unfixed — To fulfill the role and purpose of a dissertation, the literature review by nature is temporally bound and must reflect the work of an author at some point in time — and too open to comment and reaction from beyond the walls of academe — Who is his audience? Do they have the requisite authority to vet his work? By definition, a doctoral student’s peers are his or her fellow doctoral students, yet a doctoral candidate is writing for academicians to gain acceptance into their community. The heart of scholarly publication is review of the work by recognized authorities in the field.

What stands out for me here is this respondent’s treatment of a blog as uniquely uncontrollable — as if parameters of audience, commenting permissions, and posting timeframes were beyond anyone’s control. Sure, many a prof will resist spending the time it takes to learn about a new communication technology and how it can be adapted for traditional ends (that’s not yet what rewards professors), but this resistance to digital communication should not be confused with the defense of standards. Here is what seems like a promising recipe for dissertation literature evaluation to me: a blog bundled with citational management software, with levels of access and commentary defined, and — we’re dreaming here — integration with next-gen citation indexes and visualization tools. Who would argue that a broad discussion with a thesis advisor about core texts, pertinent categorization, and the scope and value of outside “feedback” would not be a fine way to kick off a dissertation project?

The professor respondent engages in some higher level handwringing: he rues that Mejias seems to be writing off the ’social’ reach of traditional scholarship. As I think about my own graduate education and beyond, I see much of the same activity you claim to be novel on your blog – I drafted and circulated manuscripts for classes and colloquia, I presented papers at conferences large and small, I sent my papers to experts in my fields, and I submitted them to journals for review. Along the way I developed my ideas and, if I was lucky, got critical feedback on them. (Technologies come and go, but it seems we’re forever stuck with feedback. ) It’s a shame, this professor suggests, that grad students only imagine themselves as writing just for a dissertation committee, rather than contributing to broader endeavors, and squandering whatever faith they may have in social dynamics into blogs: I accept the possibility that blogging may help novice scholars and researchers as they seek to become socialized in their field. But I will assert that blogging, by itself, is nowhere near sufficient for this purpose.

Of course, Microsoft Word (or, to frame this in parallel, word processing) is nowhere near sufficient for that purpose either — yet I suspect many poor grad students use this tool to assemble elements of their dissertation. I fail to understand how an advance in organization and dissemination — in content management — turns into a true threat to scholarly standards. I’m under 40 (not by much, but still), yet I can remember typing college papers (now mouldering in some box) by hand, and researching my dissertation by writing reams of notes (now mouldering in some box) by hand. I can also remember the long lines outside a superstar professor’s office — the hurried and sometimes random consultations — the way one’s fate is held hostage by overloaded advisors.

Who would seriously begrudge a better way to store, retrieve, and air ideas? Is the process of writing a dissertation not bolstered by reaction from other scholars online, from peers at one’s stage of development, from Aunt Tillie in Florida who is the world’s last opponent of the dangling participle? Do advisors really believe that their hold on students is so tenuous that mere statistics — page views, machine-counted citations — and outside exposure will debilitate their control of a project? Is the portability of a student’s research into future assemblages of material for teaching and beyond-the-diss projects not worth consideration? Distributed learning and evaluation is barreling down the pike (see, for example, Biology Direct interesting peer review process - the subject of a future post). Do we really want to discourage students from acclimating to such an environment?

I’ll climb off today’s soapbox with a nod to that workhorse library term, the “crosswalk.” Just as efforts like METS tries to usher MARC bibliographic standards into a more digital friendly metadata scheme like DC, educational technologists, professors, and librarians need to define certified crosswalks between the traditional apparatus of scholarship and the blessings of digital publication.

Will Mejias get credit for sparking a dialogue so intrinsic to scholarship? Only if the credit-givers look at blogs — and accept the possibility.

Small pieces, loosely joined: is it any wonder that 2.0talk clumps into lists? I won’t embark on a whole metalist, but here, at least, are a couple of Library 2.0 itemizations I enjoyed today, garnished with a few glib comments.

1 Taking advantage of Web and Library 2.0, by John Blyberg. Smoothly written and illustrated — takes a list generated by Dion Hinchcliffe and applies it to libraries.

• Encourage Social Contributions With Individual Benefit - all for me, me for all
• Make Content Editable Whenever Possible - and yes, not just in some little playpen
• Encourage Unintended Uses - even for books?
• Provide Continuous, Interactive User Experiences -
• Make Sure Your Site Offers Its Content as Feeds and/or Web services -
• Let Users Establish and Build On Their Reputations - hello, superpatron
• Allow Low-Friction Enrichment of Your Information - but as for high-friction enrichment… build your own %^#* library
• Give Users the Right To Remix - yes but beware ‘truthiness’
• Reuse Other Services Aggressively - including lists…
• Build Small Pieces, Loosely Joined - see Casey Bisson on a 2.0 Opac (or 2.Opac? toepack?)

2 Ten Techie Things for Librarians 2006, by Michael Stephens. Looser, sprawling entries — many emphasizing interactivity. Good intermixture of links.

• User Centered Planning & User Perceptions - again, really they’re patrons
• Building Resources & Comments Enabled - yes, right, why not try?
• Open Source Software & Shared Development - but freedom ain’t free, of course
• The Future of the ILS - tips to another Blyberg list, his ILS Customer Bill of Rights
• Devices - you know, those little electronic communication thingies that users patrons obligingly tote
• Electronic Resource Management & DRM - you know, those little electronic dis-communication thingies that thugs content providers relentlessly embed
• Mash Ups & Playlists - more fun with APIs
• Content & Experience - teen creators, Generation C, whatever you call them, when they make they wake
• Web 2.0 - uh, right, see above
• Librarians & the Heart - I think this has to do with personality, actually
• Bonus: Balance, Breathing and Being Zen - hey, breathing’s interactive too

If you were to invent del.icio.us for academics, how would it work? It would allow for bookmarking, tagging, and sharing. It would pull metadata from academic resource databases. It would allow me (the layprof) to organize collected essays and citations with a minimum of clickage. And it would do all these things in a browser, from on or off campus, independent of platform. In short, it would be quite like CiteULike.

This is a little story about my first pass into CiteULike, and if it’s not entirely a happy story, we should still bear in mind the possibilities, the promise, the 2.0ness of it all.

I abjectly learned about CiteULike just recently (designed by Richard Cameron over a year ago). Sitting through some screencasts made by Tannis Morgan at UBC , I saw how this social bookmarking tool could be useful not only as a way to track journal contents, specifically tagged articles, and other academics’ bookmarks — through RSS — but also as a means to build a library of collected resources — available anywhere and to all.

Holy digital hotness! said I. I’ll try it for myself! And here’s where minor chords start to well up in the background.

Creating an account on CiteULike was childsplay; in ten seconds I was ready to bookmark and collect. Stunned a bit by the possibilities, and revived a bit by narcissism, I decided to start a collection with articles I’ve written. Tough luck, bucko. Though CiteULike offers to browse through some 6500 journals, this roundup doesn’t include the ones that have sponsored my thoughts. In fact, many of the journals seem to be science-related. As ever, the humanist is the redheaded stepchild of resource sharing ventures.

That’s ok, said I. I’ll find some article that’s at least in my field. I saw that Nineteenth-Century Contexts was one of the proffered journals, and scanning a recent edition I saw listed an article about Mary Shelley by Diane Long Hoeveler. Very good, said I. I’ll collect that:

Two links offered to let me ‘view the article online’. Excellent idea! But these links led me to publisher sites, one of which offered a “free sample,” the other demanded $33.67 plus tax. Much disturbing mention of shopping carts. This will never do, said I. Since I am off campus, what I seem need is a way for CiteULike to create paths into Bowdoin’s collections.

So I added the citation to the mysterious Hoeveler article to my own collection, tagging it in the process. Only one-word tagging, please.

A couple of cool features to notice here: I (or anyone) can track my collection through RSS. And metadata from this collection can be gussied up for EndNote with just one click (note how my tags turned into keywords in this EndNote record):

But the problem remained: how to actually connect to the article? I dug around in CiteULike’s FAQs and felt more assured that offcampus proxy access to articles would make those shopping carts disappear. For this functionality, CiteULike pointed me to a COinS Browser Extension written by Dan Chudnov at Yale .

In order to install this little extension, I had to first install Greasemonkey in my Firefox browser — not too difficult, but, trust me, we’ve lost the layprofs by now. The COinS extension allowed me to designate my own institution’s OpenURL resolver, and plug that resolver into OpenURL links now ‘discovered’ in my browser. That way, theoretically, one could click on a resource link on any site and actually access that resource through one’s own institution. You can see this in action here: note the new link that invites me to “Check availability @ Bowdoin”.

But, alas, here’s what happened to me when I clicked that invitation to check availability@Bowdoin:

Note that none of the metadata for the article has been passed through except for the article’s date. At this point I had neither the time nor the skill nor the patience to figure out where the glitch was; I only knew that I was off campus and out of luck accessing an article I found on CiteULike.

Never give up, I told myself. With one last bit of inspiration, I decided to see whether the little bookmarklet that CiteULike distributes (”Post to CiteULike”, rather like del.icio.us’s “Remember this” bookmarklet) would work going the other way. That is, suppose I’m signed into Bowdoin’s databases, and I run across an article I’d like to post onto the CiteULike. That’s just a click of the button, right?

The FAQs warn me that automatic metadata export into CiteULike would only occur with supported databases, which are: AIP Scitation, Amazon, American Geophysical Union, American Meteorological Society, Anthrosource, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) portal, BMJ, Blackwell Synergy, CiteSeer, HighWire, IEEE Xplore, IngentaConnect, IoP Electronic Journals, JSTOR, MathSciNet, MetaPress, NASA Astrophysics Data System, Nature, PLoS Biology, PubMed, PubMed Central, Science, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, Usenix, Wiley InterScience, arXiv.org e-Print archive. (See what I mean about the humanities?) Well, JSTOR seemed my best bet, so I rooted around in Bowdoin’s library site until I found an article on Mary Shelley in JSTOR. Here was one from ELH: “Narratives of Seductions and the Seductions of Narrative: The Frame Structure of Frankenstein” (Ok I see what you mean about the humanities).

When I clicked my bookmarklet to Post to CiteULike, here’s what happened:

Hmm…. that really didn’t take the drudge out of drudgery, did it? I mean, yes, some barebones metadata is passed through, but all to the title field; I have a fair amount of tending, cutting, and pasting to do if I want this to be a real citation. If I feel like more work, I can download a PDF version of the article to my computer, then upload it into CiteULike so I can privately retrieve the article wherever I am. I can’t share the full text with other Mary Shelley aficionados, though: they have to try their own luck tunneling into their own publisher-paying institutions. Otherwise, you know, that’d be stealing.

I believe wholeheartedly that around the world, from within and without institutional walls, academics are happily collecting and sharing resources with CiteULike. I can see this happening minute by minute on the home page:

But at least right here & right now, I can’t fully play. And I feel swamped by “everyone”. How many of “everyone’s” tags link to articles I can understand, much less evaluate and collect?

Once the mechanics were ironed out, this would be my next wish for CiteULike: the creation of discipline-based communities, so I could track the tags of colleagues pondering British literature — and feel less intimidated by clustering geophysicists.

Did you find last night’s State of the Union speech unwatchable? Try looking at it another way. Once again, style.org offers a nice way to visualize the spin: the State of the Union Parsing Tool. Enter in a couple of terms and see maps of their occurrence across all of Bush’s SOTUs. Compare a Bush SOTU against ones by Washington, Lincoln, Reagan, and Clinton.

To get you started, here’s a screenshot of Bush’s SOTUs mentioning Iraq (red) and oil (blue). Click on it to visit the tool, and then try tracking your own terms:

What this tool won’t do is tell you how often assembled lawmakers hauled themselves out of their chairs for standing ovations. But some things are best left unvisualized.