flex your info

In working on my project for the OCLC Software Contest, there have been many times where I’ve thought to myself, “I wish there was a web service that would give me…”  I’ve had to adjust what I want to do at times, though I’ve also considered the possibility of writing little web services myself to do what I want.

Don’t get me wrong–the list of library web services is growing.  TechEssence documents Library Application Program Interfaces (APIs) and Library Web Chic details the OCLC offerings.  Recently, the OCLC Developer Network Blog reviewed a JISC study about Web APIs (and also nicely described the differences between APIs and Web Services).  It’s clear the APIs and web services are on the brain, and people are creating new ones, but there’s still room for improvement.

Off the top of my head, some things that I’d like to see:

• easily accessible book covers and reviews.  I think this would go a long way toward making it easy to improve online services, because that information could be turned into recommendations.  It’s also nice to have visuals in a sea of text.
• easy way to tell if a library has an item.  Why aren’t there more catalogs with web services? In order to programmatically find out if something is available at my local library, I’d have to load a search page and parse it to see if it says “NO ENTRIES FOUND”. (It says it in all caps, just like that).
• easy way to tell if there are copies of a book available.  In order to programmatically find out if there are copies of an item available at my local library, I’d have to load the item page and parse it to determine if there are copies available.  That’s a bit harder than looking for “NO ENTRIES FOUND”, because there may be multiple pages for an item for which there are a lot of copies.
• way to tell when an item was added to the catalog.  Part of what I’m doing in my little plug-in project is determining if a book is new.  But I’m not doing it by querying the date it was added to the catalog (not possible), but rather by pulling together all the “new item” RSS feeds and searching to see if the item is there.
• access to the list of items I’ve read.  My local library recently made it possible to keep a list of what you’ve checked out on your library account. It’d be awesome if I could access the information through a web service and do something with it, like generate recommendations for future reading.  Instead I have to switch back and forth between that and Amazon to manually figure out what I might want to read next.

I’m sure if I spent more time thinking about it, I could come up with many more web services I’d love to see.  But what to do about it?

Some ways to try to make ‘em happen:

• ask nicely.  Maybe your library will add some kind of access, especially if they use a home-grown or open source system.  Put in a request with your favorite system–but I’m not sure how likely it is you’ll get a response.
• make your own.  It’d be pretty easy for me to make my own little web service that takes an ISBN, queries a catalog and determines whether the library actually has a copy.  It’d be a little harder to determine if my library has a copy available for checkout. It’d be easy for me to take the table of items I’ve checked out and turn it into an XML list, but getting to that list means authenticating to the catalog which could get hairy.  Making some of my own web services is on my list of things to do, but I haven’t had a chance yet.
• um, you got me, not really sure if there’s any other way.

These are some pretty easy things that, in some cases, people have been asking about for years.  Why does library technology move at the speed of molasses?  How do we get in and make it better and faster, so that it’s easy to get what we want? What web services do you want?