before it’s

Title: Anatomy of a Murder


and after it’s


Title: Anatomy of a Murder


but they look the same when you see them on screen in default settings.

The current RSS output from the AADL library, for searches and for other feeds, is marked up to look nice in the feed reader but loses all of its semantics. So you get something like

Title: Anatomy of a Murder

If you wanted to, you could get out your parser and figure out that whatever followed a bold-faced title string was the title of the materials. But wouldn’t it be nicer for RSS data reuse of that was tagged semantically in some way so that it would be easy to pick up? So this renders instead as

Title: Anatomy of a Murder

and it’s easy to pick out of a stream.

The advantages of this start to come out when you dream about library search or reference tools that reuse data in non-traditional ways. For instance, given enough markup and a catalog that keeps track of the books you have checked out, it’s a small matter of programming to dump out a bibliography. Patrons themselves could write tools that would display a visual representation of books they had checked out (using a properly tagged image that represented the book, a la the Mac “Delicious Library” application). Or you could have a library bot answer search requests via IM and return title and author and checkout status for book search requests, but otherwise keep the response much shorter than the full catalog record.

Some of this is just thinking, others of it looks like a few minor tweaks here and there to ease reuse of things along a long pipeline of tools, some created by the library and some created by the patrons.

Ed

John Blyberg writesThe model that we should be adopting looks more like a meta-coop in which libraries work together via a developer’s network using a set of platform independent, standards-based tools to create open-source projects, programs, and sn…