Web Services Presentation
I attended a really good session on Web Services today in the Web Design and Development Track. The only problem with the session was that it was two presenters (Frank Cervone and Larry Mzarek) and not enough time. Frank provided an overview of Web Services while Larry talked more about the possible practical applications including how library’s could use Amazon’s Web Services. Both presenters did a good job. However, the session really should have been split into two sessions. Probably with the “here’s the cools stuff you can do” session first and the more technical and acronym heavy session second. I really wanted to hear Frank talk more during his tehnical overview of web services. His slides were fantastic and I just couldn’t type fast enough to keep up with the pace and level of detail. I hope he puts his slides up on the web, soon please, because his overview was excellent.
The second presenter Larry Mzarek did a good job of demonstrating the possibilities for web services in libraries using the Amazon web sevices API. Ironically, Aamzon exposes more of their search indexes via the web services API than they do on their site. So libraries have lots of options for finding Amazon information. Some information that is available via Amazon web services includes: book covers, reviews from the publisher, customer reviews, and “customers who bought this also bought”. Mzarek has a good page on his website that provides resources about Amazon web services. Also if you want to know more about this check out the book Amazon Hacks”. Incidentally, web services is also applicable to many things with Google. Check out the “Google Hacks” book if you want information on this.
This afternoon I’m going to Stephens Abrams session “What Do Gartner Preditions Really Mean to Libraries” which should be extremely interesting. If only I could make some of the people I work with come hear such a talk. I think that it might be just the wake up call they need to hear.
I’ve been searching and have yet to find any mention of Libraries’ use of AWS with regards to the license agreement. I just signed up with AWS because I’m hoping to build a library database system that utilizes their service. Upon reading the license agreement, however, I found that any application utilizing AWS can only cache certain properties for up to three months, and upon indication that an item is no longer available, it must be deleted from the “cache.” In a library setting, and especially the application I hope to build, this is inappropriate. I simply want to use a UPC or ISBN to retrieve book title, author, publisher, etc. and store that information rather than making the librarian type this information. Having a book suddenly disappear from the database would not be cool. Any thoughts?