I’m sat at the moment amongst such a collection of library UK geekdom that I’ve not experienced the like before.  I’m in the basement of Birkbeck College in London for the Mashed Libraries UK 2008 event sponsored by UKOLN and organised by Owen Stephens.

Apart from the acrobatics of trying to get on to the wifi, which I’m sure could be made more than a little simpler and less frustrating, the day has got off to a great start.  Rob Styles did a great, mostly command line driven, introduction to using Talis Platform stores.  He was followed by Tony Hurst sharing his experiences, tips, and tricks, for using online tools such as Yahoo Pipes and the spreadsheet elements of Google Docs. This was an excellent session – each time I return to Yahoo Pipes I am amazed anew and wondering why I don’t use it more.  

Next we had Timm-Martin Siewert from Ex Libris, who gave an overview of their Open Platform Strategy, and a peek in to EL Commons.  This was the subject of a recent Talking with Talis podcast with Oren Beit-Arie Ex Libris Chief Strategy Officer.  Like myself in the podcast, others today questioned why EL Commons, being  a commons, is not open to all.

A previous colleague of mine from way back, Mark Allcock  now with OCLC then gave us a brief overview of readily available APIs from them.  Finally Ashley Sanders talked about some API work at COPAC.

After an excellent lunch, small groups formed resulting in much chatting and coding.

The afternoon was punctuated by a presentation from Paul Bevan, of the National Library of Wales.  Paul took us through the issues in how they are taking their resources to the majority of visitors – online.

That brought us to the end of the afternoon and some short reports on what people had been working.  Unsurprisingly from the presentations that started the day,  there were several groups who had made great progress using Yahoo Pipes and the Talis Platform and in several cases both of these.  For example via Pipes one group were pulling book records from Amazon, adding Jacket images then augmenting them with holdings data from the Platform. Another plotted library locations for records from the Platform, on a Google Map by again using holdings data and also location data from the Silkworm Directory.

All in all an excellent day enjoyed by thirty plus people interested in using technology to improve libraries.  There is already talk of the next one.  Well done Owen for organising this one.

Update: Dave Pattern has uploaded several photos of the day to Flickr – the image above being one of them.

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