Paul Stainthorp Technology in the Library

I went to Goldsmiths, University of London, today, at the invitation of Craigie-Lee Paterson, for a mashlib event of sorts.

While I remembered my camera, I forgot to put its battery in: so unfortunately no photos from me. Here’s one from CLP, though: entitled “Earnest, Pensive and Nonchalant“.

And another one of me pretending to understand open bibliographic data.

There were about 17 people there, so it was nice and intimate! Mostly drawn from member institutions of the M25 consortium, but at least one delegate had come from as far away as York St John University.

First speaker in the morning was the University of Sussex’s Chris Keene, who gave a high(ish)-level overview of the principles of mashing up data, and the ways in which the Web is changing.

Next, Gary Green went through some more practical examples of how the ‘standard toolkit’ of Yahoo! Pipes, Google spreadsheets, Firefox extensions, Twitter et al.

Lastly for the morning session, I talked about Jerome before a bit of a group discussion about the difficulties in developing a mashup ‘culture’ in universities.

After a very healthy(!) lunch (surely not a real mashed library event; not with fruit on the table…), we moved into an I.T. lab in Goldsmith’s library for the hands-on afternoon. Gary walked the group through Yahoo! Pipes 101 before people had a go at manipulating their own data and feeds in Pipes (I saw people hacking into EPrints, Google Reader, Twitter and the Guardian, amongst other data sources). Finally, we discussed ways of presenting RSS feeds to users, and I rounded it off with a look at using Google spreadsheets and cheap tools for manipulating and presenting journal information.

Thanks to CLP for the invitation to take part. And thank you for all the positive|feedback|and|nice|comments.

Tweets from the day (hashtag #clp25mash) are saved in Twapper Keeper.