Library Web Chic

Library Search AIM Bot

“I love perl. I just coded up a AIM bot to search some random library.
Took me 20 minutes. I should be doing my ECE100 homework, but at least
I got something interesting done. You can check out the code at lib_aim_search.pl or actually use it by messaging easyasy2kbot.

The bot should be up as much as I can for the next few days on my
laptop, starting tuesday morning (connection issues right now…).

It was surprisingly easy to code, especially with IPAC systems returning XML. (See the code for specifics)

This was in response to The Shifted Librarian's post on AIM bots
a few hours ago, where she wanted AOL to make more than just a 'Who
wants to be a millionaire' bot. Well, AOL isn't going to do it, so I
thought I would.

This is really just a spin off of code I couldn't find that did what this AIM with Amazon.com O'Reilly hack did (I did it about a year before the book was published).” [PROTOPLASMIC.ORG]

Too… damn… cool! Who knew this was so easy? Leland Johnson, that's who! He's got this running against the West Nyack Free Library's Horizon catalog, so now I'll have to try this out with my own organization's Innovative one. If it works, Aaron could add the AIMbot to the business cards he's handing out with his Library's AIM screen name!

So all together now, everyone throw a big thank you Leland's way, and wish him luck on his ECE100 homework!

Side note: as of 11:30 pm CST, I'm not getting any results from the
AIM bot, but I don't think it's the code's fault because I'm not
getting any results returned from within the WNFL catalog either. I'll
try again tomorrow.

[from The Shifted Librarian]

This story has been all the rage of late and when I first read it I
got really excited. I've taken a quick look at the Perl and let me say
that it is a thing of beauty and surprisingly simple as well. The thing
that got me the most excited was the fact that it uses XML being served
up by the web-catalog. How cool! the beauty of all this is that you
should be able to get XML out of the web-catalog for a multitude of
purposes including creating RSS feeds. Over at Overdue Ideas
Owen Stephens has talked about this off and on. Just another example of
the power of XML for libraries and why every systems/techy librarian
should be running to learn XML ASAP.