Yesterday I was listening to two of my colleagues discussing our platform and what should be done with a catalogue, when I realised that I did not have a clue as to what was going on. When geek-talk overwhelms me I tend to reach back for philosophical roots.
— “Hang on a minute — I interjected — you are talking about our ontology. I didnt realise that we have an ontology”.
Well it turns out that we do, … Keep Reading
One hesitates to recommend a 50 minute podcast. But this chat at Talis’s The Library 2.0 Gang had some interesting comments. The focus of the discussion was on the recently release Google Book Search Viewability API, and there seemed to be fairly general agreement that it was a step in the right direction but not yet enough.
Google needs to loosen up a bit and open up some more to enable some really interesting literary mashups to take hold. … Keep Reading
Perhaps I should have mentioned in yesterday’s blog that there is a sentimental interest in Google Catalogs from the Exact Editions side. When we were planning our platform in early 2005 we decided that the minimum level of functionality for a digital magazines service, as we conceived of it, was to be as good as Google Catalogs. I am not quite sure why we picked on Google Catalogs as our benchmark, rather than Google Books (which was above the parapet … Keep Reading
Thumbnails are useful. I hope that the institutions that are taking out site licenses to our magazines will include thumbnails of their front cover in their OPACs (see the source code of this page for the relevant HTML). Sometimes a front cover is worth 10,000 words.
Maybe we should offer subscribing institutions a free widget which will keep itself up to date and carries the front cover of the current issue and then links the student straight through to the … Keep Reading
Aaron Miller of the Book Glutton, has an interesting post on books, file formats and the web at the TeleRead blog. The comments are also worth reading. Aaron makes the point that both Google and Amazon, two of the webs giants, are heavily committed to books and to putting books straight on the web, page by page (people tend to overlook the extent to which Amazon is doing this in all the hoo-ha about the still experimental Kindle).
Aaron … Keep Reading
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