Ross Singer at ACCESS 2005: (Grease)Monkeywrenching the Library:

The second part of the presentation title struck me and i just had to put it up on my blog: "utilizing the sloppy underbelly of the web to expose our collections and services" That's what we are doing with the Library Toolbar and Google Scholar, but there is more to be done ...... More "sloppy techniques":

• Bookmarklets
• Firefox Extensions
• User Scripting
• OpenSearch

together with:

• Javascript Screen Scraping
• "Light" Web Services

The presentation is straight, indeed monkeywrenching great techniques. I must dig in, because i know too little about some of these things and it could be very usefull!

Most of the presentations of ACCESS 2005 are available IN AUDIO (MP3) This is nice because it is added value to the powerpoints. Ross Singer explains for instance their implementation of

E-JOURNALS SUGGEST in SFX METALIB, just like Google Suggest. It was his experience that users of SFX / metalib got so many bad results (0 results) because of just typing in the wrong things (wrong in the meaning of not right for the libary system to understand) .

This subject is never mentioned in the presentation, but he talked about it, and it struck me, because the idea was brought up by the guy who controlles the METALIB/SFX configuration for our University Library, based on the user stats of RUGCOMBINE!

Let us see how we can make this happen!