Monthly Archives: May 2011

So these days there are lots of really well-done, useful, free APIs around, especially from Google. The obvious invitation is to use them in your apps. The potential problem is that a free API, which you have no contract or service … Continue reading →

I am not the first one to suggest this (I think Ross Singer and Ed Summers have promoted it in the past), but this really cool wikipedia-miner tool mentioned by Arash Joorabchi on the code4lib list made it suddenl seem … Continue reading →

Talking a bit about this on Stu Weibel’s blog, Stu invited me to send some suggestions to OCLC.  Most of these suggestions can really only be done by OCLC and/or Google (although if done they’d make things possible at the … Continue reading →

I’ve written before about the common practice, in my opinion a very questionable one, that academic library special collection departments have of charging usage fees for images from special collections that vary depending on intended use. This is to my … Continue reading →

The developer of the ruby state_machine library (whose name I think might be Aaron Pfeiffer) talks about some of the challenges and reasons for success he and the other developers had in making state_machine a dependable, high-quality, well-adopted library.  I … Continue reading →

I have for a while been using the “Google Book Search Data API” to search Google Books, in order to provide links in Umlaut. There is now a new api from google for this purpose, called the “Books API“. This … Continue reading →

In a post on NGC4Lib, Eric Lease Morgan tells us about a new service in their catalog, where they provide concordances on item detail pages to provide more information about an item. For instance, see the “Analyze using text mining … Continue reading →

If any rails-ists are reading, interested in feedback if this makes sense. In Rails2 “engine” hack, your plugin assets would be copied to the local app in a special directory on app startup, and then referred to with a special … Continue reading →