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10 December 2006
Services to depend on
Posted by Richard Wallis at December 10, 2006 11:18 PM
Tony Hurst over on the OUseful Info blog the other day, gave an update on his progress developing OU Library Traveler - the Greasemonkey plug-in which he entered in to the Mashing Up The Library Competition.
The Traveler is really taking shape, with title and author lookups having been added and recently links to ebook resources have also been built in.
Following discussions with the Library, the functionality has been tightened up somewhat and a greater focus placed on delivering OU Library services, with the result that things like a Google Books lookup are unlikely to appear in the official release.
Its great to see, what would a few months back may probably been called a toy, heading towards an official release. - Power to your elbow Tony!
Later in his post, postulating how the Traveler could be developed to enable the Open University's distributed community identify books in academic libraries [who offer lending rights to OU students] local to them, Tony says the following:
The Talis Platform project is one tool we could start using, but as with using all 'free' third party services/APIs: how do we know that a) the data will be kept up to date?; and b) how do we know the service will hang around for the next few years?
Taking a baby steps approach, what I'd quite like to see is a script that will add links identified via Talis Platform to results pages like this one that in turn lead directly to the corresponding catalogue; or, even better, buttons that will let the user search the corresponding catalogue from a single search box at the top of the page...
How do we know that the data will be kept up to date, and will hang around for the next few years? - Understandable concerns. How many academic projects have bloomed, delivered useful data, then either run out of money/hit political problems, and disappeared? How many directories of Z39.50 targets have been set-up by enthusiastic groups only to grow stale over time as the members of the group loose enthusiasm or move on to other things? How many people are concerned about the currency and life expectancy of the data and services provided by Amazon Web Services?
I suspect that the answer to the Amazon question may be coloured by issues around having to route users to Amazon's sites, to satisfy their licensing conditions, but not by the dependability of the service. Why is that?
To use that particularly distasteful but appropriate bit of current business-speak, Amazon eat their own dog food. If the services providing Amazon Web Services go down, Amazon goes down. It is a commercial imperative for Amazon to keep the engines running
So why would services/APIs provided by the Talis Platform be worth depending upon? - because we have built services upon our own Platform and are continuing to build more. Talis Source is service providing free resource contribution and discovery to the Interlending Community along with optional low-cost request management. Since its launch last spring the all measures of the size of Source have grown dramatically. Talis Source is built upon Talis Platform Services, all contributions that appear in Source are contributed to the Platform.
Project Cenote uses platform services, so does our own Greasemonkey plug-ins Amazon@Libraries and LibraryThingThing. These are just a few obvious examples of where it is an imperative for Talis to keep the Platform services current, scalable, and available. These will be joined soon by many other examples both large and small. We and others are starting to build more and more on the Platform.
As with the adoption of any new technology/service/business model there is going to be some reticence from many before trying it, but it is also true that the early adopters often gain the much by being such
Finally to address the concerns about data and commerce, by mentioning Amazon as an example, I draw your attention to the Talis Community License which is designed to preserve access to data freely contributed.
Technorati Tags: Talis, Talis Platform, AquaBrowser, Library, Aquabrowser, Cenote, Web Services
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