I talked about search, share and subscribe the other day as library systems develop more engaging experiences. Here are some additional notes based on some things coming over my desk in the last day or so.
- Via Alison Pope I read about how custom RSS feeds and Opensearch are included in the latest Aleph release. I have been involved in a few conversations of late which have been considering how the library is visible in emerging collaborative environments and space is a word we keep returning to. I was interested in the following from the Ex Libris press release:
Support for RSS and OpenSearch RSS is part of the Ex Libris initiative for collaborative and social computing in a user-centric universe. “Ex Libris will continue to empower users in molding library resources to individual needs, and to deliver library information to each user’s space”, says Katriel Reichman, ALEPH Product Manager. “We call this focus user centric, user space.” [Ex Libris – News details]
- I mentioned the NCSU catalog. Tito Sierra who works in the library at NCSU sent me a note about Smart Subjeccts:
With Smart Subjects I am trying to build a framework for deploying
lightweight library recommendation services that use arbitrary text
as an input, and that can deployed in external applications
(typically search applications). - We appear to be seeing some coalescence around a faceted browse structure which exploits the data in result sets. In this context, I was interested to see how Ask.com have redesigned their site, with links to broader and narrower topics and related names on the right of returned results. It gives some good hints for further exploration, as in the example shown here. This may be based on the Teoma conribution?
- Update: I noted the intesting PennTags a while ago; these have been the subject of some conversation recently. Michael Winkler just left a comment on my original post noting that PennTags have now been integrated into the catalog.
