Posted on November 19th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp
Four students from the University of Liverpool calling themselves Team Ook Nog took the prize for the best use of library activity data at last weekend’s DevXS student hackathon in Lincoln. Their application used the openly-licensed national OpenURL router data from EDINA and used it to build a search/recommendation tool for scholarly journal articles. You can see the fruits of their labour here…
Jude-Thaddeus Ojiaku, Andrew Collins, Arnoud Pastink and Thomas Gorry built the Ook Nog site in a marathon development session over 30 hours in the Engine Shed. A simple Google-like search box (very Google-like!) displays results of articles and books derived solely from the OpenURL router data (example); each result has context-sensitive links out to dx.doi.org, OCLC firstsearch, CORE repository search, and Google Scholar. Clicking on any search result shows a chart of activity for that article, along with “See Also…” suggestions for other articles accessed by the same user in a similar timeframe. Take a look at the results.
From the DevXS wiki:
“Ook Nog is an interface for the data provided by openurl allowing you to search all of the data for any term and find search terms within their archive. By selecting any prior search term, you can then browse all search terms that were also performed by that user(s) within a small time period.
“All publications/searches are nodes. A node shares an edge with another node if a user has searched both nodes. We try to increase the chance of relevance by only showing neighbours of a node that were formed +- 90 days (a semester!).
“Despite no further tests of relevancy, the searches/publications found can be surprisingly similar (or amusing).”
The team from Liverpool pipped their traditional regional rivals to the library prize – Team MCR, made up of student developers from 3 different Manchester universities (University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Salford). Team MCR built a working DevXS library app based around course reading lists with some interesting social ranking features, designed with great care using the Balsamiq wireframe UI tool, and making use of several open bibliographic datasets including the MOSAIC project data and Cambridge University Library’s search APIs. For their trouble, they picked up the #DevXS ‘social’ prize, awarded by the University of Lincoln Social Research Centre (LiSC).
DevXS was brilliant. Thanks again to Ian Snowley for the idea of donating a University of Lincoln Library prize. £250 in Amazon vouchers are on their way to Liverpool now.
Tags: #jiscad, activity data, Andrew Collins, APIs, Arnoud Pastink, Basamiq, Cambridge University Library, CORE, DevXS, DOI, EDINA, Google Scholar, hackathon, Ian Snowley, Jude-Thaddeus Ojiaku, library data, LiSC, Manchester Metropolitan University, MCR, MOSAIC, OCLC, Ook Nog, OpenURL, prizes, recommendation, search, team, Thomas Gorry, University of Liverpool, University of Manchester, University of Salford
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Posted on May 13th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp
I’ve just returned from the formal launch event for Lincs to the Past, the new flagship website from Lincolnshire County Council which provides online access to “the cultural heritage collections” of the county.
The launch party was held at the Collection museum in Lincoln.
Lincs to the Past builds on a previous project of the county council called ‘Cultural Collections‘, which provided a unified search interface for resources held in various cultural-service catalogues (library, museums, archives).
The new website adds a whole load of interesting functionality on top of that single search, including:
- Records collected together to form exhibitions
- Very-high-quality digitised image browse (example) including rich navigation using Zoomify
- User tagging and commenting
- Faceted search (by date period, subject term, and domain: i.e. library, museum, or archives)
- Online help
You can find Lincs to the Past at: www.lincstothepast.com
Tags: archives, Cultural Collections, events, history, humanities, images, launch, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, Lincolnshire County Council, Lincs to the Past, LISN, local history, museums, public libraries, search, The Collection, websites, Zoomify
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Posted on March 31st, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp
I’d almost forgotten we’d done this: I wonder if anyone’s been using it?
http://www.facebook.com/universityoflincoln
“University of Lincoln (UK) official page > Search the University library catalogue online”
It’s just an HTML form that replicates a HiP general keyword search. I’ve done the same thing in our tab in Blackboard. We nicked the idea from (I think) Birkbeck, University of London.
Tags: Birkbeck, Facebook, HiP, library catalogue, search
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Posted on August 20th, 2010 by Paul Stainthorp
I’ve just recreated my list of magazines from Google Books for the University’s e-journals site.
Google now hosts 199 digitised magazine titles, and for the sake of 10 minutes’ work every few months it would be a shame to miss out on the extra full-text coverage, which often complements the “library” sources for a title.
E.g. for the frankly un-put-downable Estonian Journal of Archaeology (available as an Open Access (OA) journal from 2006-, and indexed in Art Full Text), Google provides the missing articles from 1997 (vol.1) up to 2006.
I’d like to be able to harvest the Google Books content to build my list using the standard mashlib toolkit (Google spreadsheets; Yahoo! Pipes; some coffee)… but while use of Google’s =ImportHtml() function is limited to 50 per spreadsheet, and because Google search pages block robots.txt files, I can’t figure out a way of doing so.
Instead, I’ve been copying-and-pasting the search results pages into an ordinary Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (thanks, again, Google, for making this possible through your magazine browse page), then using a custom Excel function to ‘unmask’ the URL hidden behind each hyperlinked magazine title.
Finally, I use a bit of text-to-column splitting, search/replace, and filling-in of package-wide fields, to give me a compatible, tab-delimited text file which I then upload to our e-journals knowledge base (which happens to be EBSCO A-to-Z) – I used EBSCO’s custom notes feature to link to Google’s cover image to each entry in the file.
Tags: A-to-Z, browse, e-journals, EBSCO, Estonian Journal of Archaeology, Google, Google Books, hacks, magazines, mashlib, Microsoft Excel, search
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