 Wednesday, December 18, 2002
Matt Croydon dove into Debbie's request for an AmazonLookup Bookmarklet, going one better to also create a Barnes & Noble Lookup Bookmarklet. Thanks, Matt!
Art also notes that Chris Sauve offers Amazon Bookmarklets, too!
Jon is still running with the concept (kudos and big thanks to him), and today he highlights the problems using ISBNs as identifiers. He goes on to ask:
"I wonder if there's a need for a Web service to solve this. Given an ISBN (for, say, a mass market paperback), it would map from species to genus, collect all species in the genus, and return a lists of ISBNS (paperback, hardcover, audiocassette, etc.)
Should Amazon implement such a service? We live in such interesting times!"
A web service is an intriguing idea, but I'd rather see librarians implement and maintain it, rather than a commercial entity. OCLC's WorldCat seems like a logical place to start, except for the fact that they charge for access to it. Do we have any other candidate databases that could be the foundation for such a project (LOC?...)?
All of this work inspired Greg at the Travis Unified School District to create a title lookup using ASP and VBS pages for his School's Follett catalog. This one appears to work on Macs, too, so kudos to him!
On a side note, it turns out my SWAN toolbar isn't working after all. I could have sworn I was able to search from it, but now I can't. The problem seems to be the syntax for the search argument sent from the toolbar into the Innovative catalog. So far, I've tried all of the following, but none of them work:
If anyone can figure out what syntax I should plug into my Ultrabar, I'd be eternally grateful. Alternatively, can anyone help me hack Dave's Quick Search Deskbar (as suggested by another Greg)? Thanks!
Spit Vicious
"Punk Rock Baby (home of punk tunes and others not generally nursery indigenous -- in lullaby form) emails news of its holiday festivities: 'May the best little terror win.' " [Bag and Baggage]
I wanted to make sure Will saw this one. Sadly, no SWAN library owns these (heeeeyyyyy, Aaron!) so I'll have to try to interlibrary loan them.
Yahoogroups RSS
"It's a trivial hack but I created a web page that will help you create URLs for RSS feeds from Yahoo Groups mailing lists.
It's hosted over on the archive at: http://feeds.archive.org/misc/yahoogroups/
The RSS generation feature of Yahoo Groups requires that the list's archives be publicly readable. If the archives aren't publicly readable then you can't get RSS from them without some cookie juggling.
I keep about a dozen of these feeds subscribed in my aggregator. I came across several new lists recently and found it rather tedious to create RSS URLs for them. This greatly eases the process. Give it a try and, as always, feedback is appreciated." [Syndication News from Bill Kearney]
Thanks, Bill!
Congressman Set to Introduce Legislation to Address Constitutional Concerns About the USA Patriot Act
"Vermont Congressman Bernard Sanders will be holding a press conference on Friday, December 20, at 11:00 a.m., at the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington, Vermont, to announce his plans to introduce legislation that eliminates what he believes are unconstitutional provisions in the USA Patriot Act. Joining Sanders at the press conference will be Karen Lane, president of the Vermont Library Association (VLA); past VLA president Trina Magi; and Linda Ramsdell, owner of the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick, Vermont, and president of the New England Booksellers Association (NEBA).
Sanders' announcement comes in response to a letter from members of VLA, sent to the congressman in November, which states that the Patriot Act contains provisions that 'undermine' Americans' constitutionally protected right to read and to access information without government interference." [Bookselling This Week, via Library Stuff]
Vermont librarians and constituents should contact Congressman Sanders and let him hear your support on this issue.
Marriott To Install Wi-Fi Wireless Internet Access
"Marriott International said on Wednesday that it plans to install wireless high speed Internet access at 400 hotels in the U.S. and internationally.
The service will be available by spring in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the U.S., in some Marriott, Renaissance, Courtyard, Residence Inn, TownePlace Suites, Fairfield Inn, and SpringHill Suites hotels. The company is working with STSN, its preferred high-speed Internet access provider, to provide the service.
The service will be available in hotel lobbies, meeting rooms, and public spaces, complementing current in-room high-speed Internet access. Although some consumer businesses provide free wireless Internet access on premises, Marriott's services will require a fee. The service will use the 802.11b and 802.11a standards." [Insurance & Technology Online, thanks to Steven for the pointer]
Whoo-hoo! Especially since I'm a Marriott Rewards member. :-)
FBI's Reading List Worries Librarians
"New surveillance laws that have made it easier for FBI agents to obtain search warrants for library records have created a dilemma for librarians such as Strong: Should they unquestioningly help agents track what a patron has been reading, and perhaps help prevent a terror attack? Or should they resist, and try to protect individual liberties and the library's status as a haven of intellectual inquiry?
Few librarians across the nation say they have been approached by federal agents in the terrorism probe; Strong won't say whether the feds have visited him in Queens. But the questions raised by the FBI's increased authority have made political activists out of some librarians, who are filing lawsuits against the Justice Department and lobbying Congress in a growing debate over whether American values are being trampled in the name of homeland security.
At issue is the USA Patriot Act, the post-Sept. 11 legislation approved by Congress that, among other things, gave federal agents broad new powers to spy on people in this country. Under the Patriot Act, the FBI no longer has to show a judge that it has probable cause to believe that a person under surveillance has committed a crime to get a search warrant for a library's circulation records or computer hard drives, or a bookstore's sales records.
Now, an agent merely must convince the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that such records could aid a terrorism probe. Along with the search warrant comes a gag order — a judicial command to the record-keeper to tell nobody about the visit or else risk being prosecuted." [USA Today]
As I've noted in the past, this is a disturbing situation, and librarians are out there on the front lines trying to protect your right to privacy.
Having noted this, however, I will say that when I first read the headline on this article, I thought it meant that librarians were worried about what books the FBI was reading. Which we would be, except that we respect their right to privacy, too. But since they're not interested in fairness, I thought I'd try to track down what they're reading by visiting Amazon's purchasing circles but alas, there is no list for the FBI. Hmmmm....
Irish Experts Calculate 'Perfect' Pizza Formula
"Ireland's known for its good beers, rolling green hills--but perfect pizza?
A couple of scientists at the University College Dublin have come up with a formula--using something called "fuzzy logic"--to create a mathematically correct pizza. Everything from how round the pizza should be to how thick to spread the sauce will all be laid out.
But 'it's doomed for failure,' says Don Bacin, who has been making pizzas for over 20 years at Bacino's Pizzeria-Trattoria. 'You can never make two pizzas to look exactly alike.'
The pizza of the future will have sauce spread evenly and lushly across its base and its mushrooms, ham, sausage and other toppings will be positioned with millimetric accuracy, thanks to the culinary efforts of Sun Da-Wen and Tadhg Brosnan at the Irish university.
Of course, the Irish aren't the experts when it comes to a good pizza pie. Who knows pizza better than a Chicagoan, where each man, woman and child eats an average 46 slices--or 23 pounds--of pizza a year?...
The breakthrough was derived from digital snapshots of 25 pizzas which were then broken down and transformed into a mathematical formula to define the optimal pizza's base area, spatial ratio between toppings and circularity.
Of course, it takes a mathematician and not a chef to decipher the formula for a ham and mushroom pizza:
Ham area percentage=(ham area/base area) x 100; mushrooms area percentage=(mushroom area/base area) x 100; topping area percentage=(ham area + mushroom area)/base area] x 100.
And don't even begin to ask about how much sauce to put on." [Chicago Sun-Times]
I will say that my family is more than holding its own for the average intake of pizza per year....
Debbie asks, "So, today I was checking out the latest books in my local OPAC (not Innovative, but CARLweb) and I wanted a bookmarklet that would lead me from the library entry to the Amazon page so I could read reviews and see what the book was about. That ISBN is there in the URL--it's gotta work the same way, right?"
This should be pretty easy to do, but I don't know thing one about building Javascript bookmarklets. Jon's done all of the lifting here, heavy and otherwise. Unless someone pipes up that they've already done this, I'll play around with it tomorrow if I have time.
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