Quiet Summer (or not)

I originally planned for this summer to be a quiet one without any travel after early June. I wanted to have some time to recover and also not be stressed out the way I was last summer with too many commitments (professional and personal) and a web redesign I was trying to push to get done. This year, I have almost no travel, which is a really good things because I have a TON of writing to do. I have to be time on task too because my fall is shaping up to be a full. I’m giving a talk at Access, teaching pre-conferences at Internet Librarian, and likely going on a vacation in November.

So this summer involves a bunch of little projects and writing. I’m working on integrating the WorldCat API into our content management system and blogs so that librarians can easily add books from WorldCat on to a web page or blog post. The end goal is to allow people to mashup bibliographic data from WorldCat with book covers, ratings from LibraryThing, and links to text via Google Books where possible. Right now I’m working on this as a widget for Wordpress so for example you could show all the books from a particular author.

I also want to be able to mashup electronic holdings information from our OpenURL resolver with print holdings from our catalog. This project is going to take me a while longer because I’m still trying to figure out how to programmatically get data out of our catalog. Sigh

One nice thing about being off the road is that I actually have time to work on some of these projects. Although my head feels like it is going to explode today because of writing and testing PHP code. My PHP skills are limited so there is a lot of Googling and reading of documentation/examples going on. On the plus side I’ve got a my stage 1 prototype built for integrating the WorldCat search results into a WYSIWYG. Moving back and forth between two very similar projects is interesting and kind of fun. I hope to have a full fledged prototype done by early next week so I can put together a screencast about it for this year’s Social Software Showcase.