Hear from your library
I was listening to the latest Library 2.0 gang podcast earlier today which was discussing mashing up the library. John Blyberg, from Ann Arbor District Library made a very interesting observation that everyone has iPods these days so why shouldn’t library data be made available on the iPod. This idea is based on a fundamental principle of Web 2.0 - “deliver value to users, when, where and in the form that they require it.”
He explains that we have many: “conduits to access stuff, so much stuff in our library is online, and we have tools and gadgets at our disposal, us and our patrons have them integrated into our daily lives” he mentions that this is a “hugely untapped resource, if we could figure out a way to download their holdings, their checked out items to their iPods, everyone has an iPod, why not take advantage of it? It’s about looking at all of these conduits and point of entry that people use, and giving the library presence. Everyone has a different context with which they use the library, and it’s not going to always be the same, it used to be the OPAC but this is going away.”
I decided to take this idea and see what I could come up with. The obvious way to deliver data to iPod + iTunes would be through a podcast. The data would come from the View My Account Web Services API of Talis Keystone and I just needed to figure out a way to synthesize speech to an audio file which mashed up the Web Service API to produce some suitable output. I decided that I would just, for the purposes of a simple prototype write some software which generated an audio file containing some prose auto generated in real-time from the data coming back from Talis Keystone. This would give a short summary of a borrowers account, which includes their name as known by the library, the number of reservations, loans, ILL’s and bookings they have and also how much they owe in charges.
Here at Talis I have testing and development environments of Talis Keystone which I can use to test the services and also to create client applications which consume the services. In less than an hour, using the Java Speech API and an API called FreeTTS I was able to knock up a simple prototype which consumes the Talis Keystone View My Account API to produce this output file. The audio is currently very robotic, but it proves the concept that we can deliver library data in this manner to an iPod.
Once you have the audio, of course, you’re not just limited to sending it to an iPod. Why not offer an alternative to the SMS-based capabilities of our current Talis Mobile product, and include the option to have the library system phone you up and *speak* to you about routine library interactions such as the recall of a book?
A Talis Keystone environment will soon be available in a sandbox area of the TDN for other developers to try out solutions, test their ideas and create similar innovations by consuming the Web Services.
