04.24.07

Notelets: Educause, library catalogue APIs, Roy Tennant moving to OCLC, Citizendium API

Posted in Citizendium, OCLC, Uncategorized, libraries, notelets at 5:08 pm by yee

I wish I could attend the Educause Western Regional Conference happening the week after next in SF, whose speaker list includes a number of folks I know personally.

It's great to see more library catalogs with APIs, such as those documented in REST output from Huddersfield's catalogue.

Congratulations to Roy Tennant on his new position at OCLC:

    With OCLC I have an incredible opportunity to be active on a broader stage. OCLC is big enough to put libraries on the Internet map in a way that none of us could achieve alone. Open WorldCat is but one example of many. I will be working as a Senior Program Manager with the RLG Programs unit of OCLC Research and Programs. I will report to Jim Michalko, who in turn reports to Lorcan Dempsey. I have met virtually all of the top management team at OCLC and I've been very impressed. They know where things are heading and they're determined to position libraries in a way that will do us the most good.

It's a big loss for CDL — but I'm looking forward to seeing Roy's influence at work on the larger playing field of OCLC.

I unintentionally deleted all my cookies in Firefox Argh. The interface should have prompted me that I was deleting all my cookies and not just the one I had highlighted. and deleting cookies — should be prompted!

The Citizendium editorial council email list is archived on the web — e.g., The Cz-editcouncil April 2007 Archive by thread

Any reason to use Shelfari instead of LibraryThing?

Citizendium and APIs

Posted in APIs, Citizendium at 10:48 am by yee

I'll have to write more soon about Citizendium, which is

    an experimental new wiki project. The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on that model by adding "gentle expert oversight" and requiring contributors to use their real names.

As a member of the Citizendium Editorial Council, I've not yet had much time at all to contribute to the Citizendium but hope to have more time once I'm over the big push right now on my book. My interests around Citizendium are as as much about the technological framework as the actual content of the system. For instance, I hope to help shape technical standards and APIs at the Citizendium to allow for better reuse of its content. (See the documentation for the API available at the Wikipedia that allows external programs to access the Wikipedia and recombine and reuse content.)