Coordinator/Presenter: Annette Bailey<afbailey@vt.edu> , Digital Assets Librarian, Virginia Tech University Libraries
Mashups Virginia Tech uses
RSS Feeds
Amazon API for book jackets
StrikeIron that links providers and users
MAJAX
Mill Ajax software from Virginia Tech to allow you to mix cat data with webpages
New books for example – New books and circ data lets you mash circ data and new books data into a webpage
MaJax uses Javascripts Millennium and html
Screen scraping is used to get the data out of the catalog.
Example – faculty want to create a list of books for his course using Millennium data. This can be done using MAJAX
You only need to know HTML to use MAJAX
To install MAJAX majax.js and majax.html needs to be uploaded to your /screens directory.
<script type=”text/javascript”
scr=http://yourlibrarycatalog/screens/majax.js>
…
use span and identifiers to make info display.
MAJAX classes: holding,bib, and misc.
Example: majax-harvard-reference for bib format
Majax-showholdings-div for holdings
Majax-marc-050 for call number
Can be used for any field and subfield
Majax-marc-050
Majax-linktocatalog
Majax-syndetics-vtech
Load Considerations
MAJAX uses caching
MAJAX imposes additional load on your III system
Self limiting of 100 requests per second per page which can be changed.
Limitations
Only works on pages from within the same domain as your mill system
All holycross.edu is ok for us. Works with Firefox, IE and safari
MAJAX provides the ability to include live catalog information in any webpage in your domain
It is easy to use only requiring html skills and it is free.
Part 2 – Google Book Classes
Majax pulls data out. Now lets look at putting data into the catalog.
Google Book Search API lets you interact and harvest out data from Google.
Programmatic client side access to small set of Google book search information
For example seeing part of Google books in the catalog with not need to be a programmer.
icon leading to Google Book Preview can be posted on your catalog records using Google Book Classes. The button will only appear if there is a preview available.
This can be used on any webpage.
Code is available on libx.org
Put gbsclasses.js in your website and use the script tag in your page and then use fieldspec token in briefcit.html file
ISBN with Google in not very good. LCCN and OCLC is much better.
Libx.org/gbs
Libx.org/majax
