Today I came across a very cool website - Get London Reading. It’s done by Booktrust with support from 3M. From the name I thought it was going to be a new initiative for getting more people to read (which it is), but the best bit about it is the Google maps mashup they have that shows books set in London.   Being a Google map, you can zoom into street level and find books by each area or street, as well as click on each cover to get a short synopsis and author and publisher details.

There is also a free edition of the Rough Guide to London by the Book, which sounds fantastic and who doesn’t like random trivia about London?

There’s currently only around 400 books, but it has potential. I’ll be using it to find new books to read that’s for sure!

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• Web 2.0 Seminar (2)

Last Tuesday Hypatia and I attended a free seminar on Web 2.0 which was a fairly interesting night. It seemed to be aimed at academic and public librarians who hadn’t had too much exposure to the whole 2.0 phenomena.

The presenter had a number of really interesting projects on the go, but they all seemed to involve a dedicated programming team. Unfortunately most law library’s don’t have the luxury of an IT department with time to devote to that kind of project. Though the fun you could have with Ajax on your side.

As Hypatia has said though, there are numerous sites available that one can make use of, within the library team, and I’m looking forward to the discussions that may come up as a result of that. Currently on the cards at HQ presently is the introduction of a team blog or wiki, though we still need to have some discussion on how this would work and how to incorporate it into our everyday tasks.

There were a number of interesting catchprases that came out of Tuesday, which stuck in my mind. ‘Experimental Social Trust’ is a fantastic way of selling 2.0, and I’ve already used this. Other useful phrases include ‘Perpetual Beta’, ‘Collective intelligence’ and ‘harnessing the wisdom of crowds’.

Something that was completely new to me was the concept of ‘mashups’. At least in the context being used. A mashup is:

A web mashup is a web page or application that combines data from two or more external online sources. The external sources are typically other web sites and their data may be obtained by the mashup developer in various ways including, but not limited to: APIs, XML feeds, and screen-scraping.
http://www.programmableweb.com/faq

There looks like there’s a few interesting mashups out there, and it’s definitely something to watch. http://www.programmableweb.com/mashups

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