Ideas….

I was poking around, trying to find some good cloud computing blogs. I found one called ElasticVapor (the owner of which started following me on Twitter a week or so ago). At anyrate I saw this posting on the Semantic Cloud Abstraction and I thought cool; Cloud Computing + Semantic Web = Brain Spinning.  But I read the post anyway.

Which was good because I found a great thing buried at the bottom: Getting Started with the Google Data PHP Client Library.  Fun!  Ok for me maybe.  I like lists and I like videos.  This minimizes my brain function and leads me to learn things quickly (which I then forget quickly).  We’re talking about moving to Google here at Wheaton for email and calendaring, so hopefully when we do I will remember these lovely PHP libraries and be able to have tons-o-fun with Google APIs.

Google Book Search has added a new API, the Embedded Viewer API. In addition to being able to call for information about the book’s preview you can create static links to various parts of the book’s preview.

Additionally, Google has also come out with a way to embed the viewer into your webpage. They have a developer guide and a reference guide on how to use the embedded view API; and they created a Preview Wizard which does it for you automatically, that’s how I created this page. They have also provided some samples to help you get started.

You can see how this information, in conjunction with the book data API would come in handy if say you wanted to create your own catalog or use images in your already existing catalog.

Interesting side note: The libraries participating in the Google Book project have decided to work together to create something called the HathiTrust. This trust will keep all the books that Google is scanning in case Google goes belly up (Google provides an electronic copy of each book it scans to the library it scanned it from). They too are developing APIs and what not so that you can get data out of the books, it’ll be interesting to see what they do with all of this data.

There has been a lot of information out there about WorldCat and to be honest I can’t keep it all straight.  So here is my reading list:

• The splash page for the WorldCat API
• WorldCat’s Developer network houses the WorldCat API Documentation
• David Walker did a presentation on the WorldCat API at Code4Lib 2008
• The World Cat Developers’ Network Blog…just in case
• Karen Coombs, author of the blog Library Web Chic, has a number of postings on the WorldCat API

If you figure out how to download the information into my brain let me know.