OPML for OPAC
Something that came up on the podcast I took part in the other day with Adam Green, Joshua Porter, and Alex Barnett was the idea of OPML for OPAC records.
By the way here is the podcast, thanks heaps Alex:
Here’s an OPMLish podcast for you
Anyway since I viewed Adam’s great Annotated Reading List it got us thinking that this could be applied to records in a library OPAC.
Each bibliographic record has several items eg. author, title, date, subject, on shelf/due date, etc…all these could be items in an OPML URL.
So each record would have its own OPML URL, you can subscribe to this OPML as an inclusion in your own OPML…if you subscribed to 10 or so records as inclusions this would be like an annotated list, you could organise them in folders if you like.
For each OPML inclusion we could have; title, subject, author as mentioned above, we could also have an item that is a permalink to it’s place in the OPAC, and also a link to the book in Amazon.
What about the On shelf/Due date item, this will always tell us the latest status, but it won’t notify or alert us…so what if this item was an RSS feed…we could still browse its contents in an OPML Browser/Reader, or subscribe to it in an RSS Reader, or something even more immediate as RSS to email, RSS to IM, or even RSS to SMS.
Anyway the idea is for each record in an OPAC to have an OPML URL…what about browsing the OPAC by author or subject term…imagine if either of these had an OPML URL.
You could click on the author OPML URL and add that to your own OPML outline…now you would have every bibliographic record from that library for that author.
So now you can browse that authors works according to the collection of that library elsewhere in an outline format, not only that it can be part of your OPML directory, you could even convert it to HTML put it in a webpage…we are not limited to browsing the contents at the library website anymore.
The important thing is that the data has now been made shareable, to do what you like with it, a great way to make list of books to read or buy.
And of course a mini-version of this outline can be put into a blog sidebar…you can have all the works from an author from a particular library in a browseable outline in your own site, and it is always current.
I can see OPML editors soon having a “blog this” button for each outline, so you can incorporate a mini outline into your blog with ease.
DIY
I can see some catalogues having an RSS feed for each subject term…whenever there is a new book in the library and it’s assigned that subject term you can be notified.
So why not take a bunch of feeds of subjects you like and add these feeds as items in an OPML outline, you have now created a Reading List…people can browse it in an OPML Browser/Reader or subscribe to the OPML URL in their RSS Reader. Whenever you add more subject feeds to the list it will be reflected in whoever subscribes to your OPML URL…add that to your sidebar and browse it!
Read/Write, social, re-mix, mashup…the web is becoming interconnected.
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