Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton

Nicole Engard (Director of Open Source Education at ByWater Solutions) recently edited a great book for library webophiles: Library Mashups: Exploring New Ways to Deliver Library Data. I found the book to be quite helpful and after reading it passed it along to our web team members to browse through to look for ideas for our new website. Although I follow what’s happening in the library web world and have worked with mashups extensively, I still found myself learning about a half-dozen mashups I’d never heard of before. The book is broken into sections, each chapter with a different mashup idea.  With over two dozen contributors, the book represents a wide swath of open source mashup ideas and thinking.  The section on library website mashups was most useful to me, though the sections on catalog data mashups, maps/images/videos mashups, and an “added value” mashups chapter all introduced me to new ways of thinking about our library data.  I think that the thing I liked best about the book was that although the chapters provided the basic info to get you started on the particular mashup being discussed, it stimulated my own thinking about new and different mashups that we could pursue.  And a book that makes you think beyond the content of its pages is a good book indeed.  The book website offers relevant links to different mashup data sources, as well as the table of contents so you can see what you’re getting.  For less than $40, it’s a worthwhile buy for your library’s staff collection.  And for all of you out there who think mashups are out of your reach, remember that many of these are literally plug-and-play solutions.  If you can get the data source information from your techies, you can just copy and paste and voila–a mashup that your library users will love.