It's always good to look outside of our profession for possible ways to improve our services. Brian Greene and Christopher Kupec are both thinking outside the librarianship box. Brian writes:

"...from the moment I saw [iTunes'] new album art display I thought it could address a serious flaw in library catalogs: browsing. In collections where many CDs and DVDs are circulating at any given time, patrons are better able to search than browse these collections. However, if iTunes' new display were implemented one could virtually browse far more effectively than is currently possible. In recent years many catalogs have added icons of cover art for books, movies and music, but the bigger size and more satisfying browse capabilities would be a vast improvement."

Chris Kupec is thinking about Delicious and LibraryThing.

Advanced Receipt Printing Solutions for Horizon 7.3

"I plan on putting the ISBNs and UPCs out there on the slips. Once those are there in ASCII, then it's a hop and a skip to upload it to LibraryThing or Delicious Library. Since LibraryThing can only import the ISBN, it's enough to make the receipt a text attachment. With Delicious Library, we can do more: attach date checked out to each item, library call number, books checked out at the same time, not to mention, Delicious can handle movies and cds, via the UPC, unlike LibraryThing....

I frankly like this method for handling reading history better than what Innovative Interfaces has developed. As far as privacy issues go, I don't like the idea of my stuff staying on a central server indefinitely. I do like the idea of the data being given to the patron for him or her to do what they want with it." [Christopher Kuplec's Weblog]