New API makes it easy to to put Google Books in your interface
Google announces an API that makes it easy to link Google Book Search in to your interface…
… we’ve released a new API that lets you link easily to any of our books. Web developers can use the Books Viewability API to quickly find out a book’s viewability on Google Book Search and, in an automated fashion, embed a link to that book in Google Book Search on their own sites.
Like several others, we at Talis got an early heads up on the release of the API and within a few hours the Browse on Google Book Search link appeared on Cenote the Open User interface to UK bibliographic holdings stored in the Talis Platform, and a demonstration prototype of the upcoming new Talis OPAC interface - Prism 3.
If you have an ISBN, LCCN, or OCLC and pass it to the API you will get back a flag to say if Google have the book, and the URL to link to if they have. Anyone with access to the html of your page and a modicum of Javascript knowledge can soon get this working.
As highlighted in another Google post about the API, several libraries have already implemented the link in their interfaces, including:
- Ann Arbor District Library
- Plymouth State University
- University of California
- University of Huddersfield
- Waterford Institute of Technology
And other online catalogue sites such as:
I expect a blizzard of posts and Press Releases as the feature appears like a rash across the worlds OPACs - Ex Libris already being near the front of the queue.
A holder of rich metadata opens up an API that makes it easy to create mashups with that data in user interfaces - isn’t that what the web world was raving about a couple of years back - you remember that Web 2.0 thingy.
So why so much excitement about this announcement now? It is because it is about book data - everyone relates to books and the library world has been so bad at opening up its data to do this - it is down to Google to do it for us. Also system vendors in our world are notorious for making it difficult to do this kind of thing.
Ex Libris, Talis, and others are demonstrating that the sleeping giant of the library systems world is at least flickering an eyelid in recognition that the world around them has changed. How long before it fully awakens to the fact that the future systems will be mashups of components and services from commercial, open source, and many currently non-library vendor organisations. Moves like the DLF ILS API initiative will only add momentum to this process - if only everyone will get out of the way, cooperate and let the inevitable happen.
March 14th, 2008 at 9:43 am
This is good news.
my playpen (not fit for public use!) using the talis ukbib store has been using a very crude way to link to google books in the past, simply adding the isbn in question to the end of the URL. Which actually worked ok-ish, but not very smart.
http://www.nostuff.org/tdn/6a/item.php?item=0596003722
(see link on the right)
The issue I guess is what XSLT can do. Ideally any website using this api will only show the link to google if it actually has some pages from the book available. Though my limited understand of XSLT makes me think this may not be possible (as it’s designed to format an xml document, not connect to web servers!). Of course I may well be wrong. I guess this is the danger of using something like xslt, easy to use, and quite elegant, but the potential to hit against a brickwall. At which point do you have to abandon what you have done and start a new technology?
March 14th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Chris — the initial version of the API is designed to run client side, rather than on the server side. So, you include the relevant code in your XSLT and then it’s down to the web browser to actually query Google to see what’s available.
March 14th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
thanks Dave.
Had read the basic annoucements without really looking in to what it actually involves. Teach me to jump to conclusions
c
May 22nd, 2008 at 3:44 pm
[…] The announcement is one of a continuing series additions to the Google Book Search service, such as the recent release of their API. […]