Applications

The availability of Linked Data in WorldCat.org has everyone here very excited. We had been anxiously awaiting the chance to make use of this new feature in our own applications, and are now beginning to try it out.

Editor's note: JD Shipengrover is a UI Designer for OCLC Research, and she's done a guest post for us today. A team from OCLC Research including Lorcan Dempsey, Thom Hickey, Diane Vizine-Goetz and Jeremy Browning created this nifty app that shows the connections between WorldCat Identities. Read on.

Hello, I'm Steven Huwig, a programmer at OCLC, and Alice asked me to write a guest post about a recent iPhone project I've completed and published in the App Store.

As one of the developers of the WorldCat Search API, I’ve been a fan of APIs and webservices for quite a while now.  And of course I’m a big fan of WorldCat.org and its links, both inbound and outbound.  So I was glad to be involved in a recent small project to supplement existing Open Library records with OCLC numbers, using their API.  Some Open Library records already had OCLC numbers, but many did not.  More OCLC numbers would make connections from Open Library records to WorldCat.org, to find physical copies, more reliable.  And for those with an OC

Over the course of the last 6 months, autosuggesters have been making an appearance many places in library user interfaces. OCLC Research has piloted auto suggest functionality in a development version of Identities and in VIAF. The Identities autosuggest functionality is outlined in issue 9 of code4lib journal article. Currently, the Identities autosuggest is experimental. VIAF also includes an autosuggest feature which can be seen on viaf.org .

Fortunately, people have been hard at work figuring out new apps and mashups with OCLC Web Services and WorldCat.org links. I've just been slow to get them out to you! But now there are twelve--count them, twelve--new apps in the OCLC Application Gallery ( in no particular order):

In case you haven't heard the news from earlier this week, the Pic2Shop iPhone app has recently done a new release that now incorporates library results, thanks to the WorldCat Search API and WorldCat R

Here at the Developer Network, we were excited to learn yesterday about a mashup which features WorldCat and the New York Times APIs was highlighted on the First Look New York Times blog. The mashup--created Wade Guidry, the Library Technology Coordinator at the Collins Memorial Library at the University of Puget Sound, and a WorldCat Mashathon Seattle attendee --is done using Yahoo Pipes and draws data (ISBN) from the NYT best seller API to create links to each of the best-selling books in Worldcat.org. Because the New York Times has several Best Seller lists, Mr. Guidry has created several Pipes.

• hardcover fiction
• hardcover nonfiction
• paperback nonfiction

The library at University of Puget Sound is also incorporating the links to the best sellers lists into their library catalog. The project just goes to show what a little coding know-how can do to improve experiences for library users. One things I'd like to be able to do is to build on this idea and write a script that uses the WorldCat Search API to check and see if a library has holdings for a particular item. If so, then create a link to that library's particular catalog. If not, then create a link to WorldCat.org. Also covers would be a great addition and could be pulled from Open Library or the LibraryThing API. I've got the basic framework sketched out but we're still getting ready for the VALAtech Boot Camp OCLC API Mashathon next Monday. Keep checking back--I should a working version posted in the next couple of weeks.

Welcome to one of the newest WorldCat partners, Occipital. They're the developers behind the latest mobile app to use WorldCat data, RedLaser.

Mashable.com included the Facebook CiteMe app in its recent list of "15 Essential Web Tools For Students". Bruce Washburn built the CiteMe app last year as the WorldCat Search API was being developed. CiteMe makes use of the API's OpenSearch implementation, and a feature that makes it easy to include pre-formatted citations in the results. On the Developer Network site you can find more information on how to do this. There's also an API feature that will return formatted citations for an individual record, using its OCLC number or an ISBN. Thanks to Rob Casson, The Miami University Library catalog is using this feature to good effect in its "Cite" links in search results and individual record displays. We're glad to see uses like this of the WorldCat Search API getting more attention, and that these services are being integrated into the web environments of our member libraries.