RedLightGreen adds Google links in the display in order that we can supplement a result with more information about the book (if we're lucky -- it can also be a bunch of Amazon resellers). It may be that we'll be able to have a richer search result in the future:
From Publisher's Weekly: Is it Frankfurt 2000 all over again, at least for one company? Google is said to be planning a press conference for the fair that will see it officially debut Google In Print. To CNN: FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) -- Google is launching a new service to make books and other printed materials searchable online, the Internet search engine company said Wednesday.
UPDATE: From Google: What is Google Print?
This free ISBN database is interesting. We've observed that in our user testing a number of students recognize the ISBN as the "right" way to search for a particular book -- it's their known item search key. (We're not really set up for known item search, but we'll probably tune RedLightGreen to do known item searching using ISBNs only.)
I was at a meeting on Friday that discussed something we couldn't quite label: ONYX for libraries might be one way to express it, bibliographic record enrichment might be another. The LC has some "publisher descriptions" of new books up. It would be lovely if these could be retrieved in XML form boy LCCN or ISBN. Both a project like this ISBN catalog and like RedLightGreen could benefit.
I continue to ponder, though, whether there's a way to leverage this information up to the work-like level. Maybe there's some cut-off: if there are less than N (where N is like 10) editions (or RLG clusters), assume tables of contents and such are useful across all editions. If there are more than N, point to those specific editions for detail.
Catalogablog, which noticed this blog's existence today has a fleeting mention of RSS as a hip tool. David suggests a feed of "most circulated books, books with most holds." I suppose the RedLightGreen system could provide a feed of the most common books in the "Your List" feature, but... other than being cool and hip, what would this do? More likely to be of interest for folks who want a sense of trends would be the top searches -- a RedLightGreen zeitgeist (pushing our emulation of Google too far).
I don't see any of these ideas really helping users discover books that inform their passions (or the field of study they said they'd stick out to make their parents happy).
I do find myself thinking of RSS as a "better than email" way of reaching users with timely information. I don't think we'd be able to come up with this for the pilot, but i'm beginning to imagine a catalog feed that combines general system notices ("Our Privacy statement has changed.") with localized notices (for all users in these zip codes, not the addition of this new library connection) with personalized notices ("Other RedLightGreen lists that have entries like yours also have the following entries:.....").
I've pondered the use of an RSS feed in the RedLightGreen environment. I can imagine someone wanting to "syndicate" the RedLightGreen "Your List" of records in a courseware interface or a syllabus on the web -- really just pulling the more or less static list into an HTML presentation. That seems to be a good enough justification. Having the list as a subscription in one's newsreader might be preferred by some users to having a bookmark in a web browser; that's a slightly less compelling motivation. I imagine a group working on a project together, sharing their reading lists -- but how often would these lists change? I know that there will be clever uses for it if we make a feed available, so I'll probably urge a trial at some point during the pilot.
I find myself more ambivalent after finding Dan Gillmor's note that "Amazon.com Syndicated Content" is now available. Amazon writes, "Selected categories, subcategories and search results in Amazon.com stores now have RSS feeds associated with them, delivering a headline-view of the top 10 bestsellers in that category or set of search results." It is, perhaps, that there are no little orange XML blocks anywhere to be seen that frustrates me. And perhaps i should celebrate: if i can't simply subscribe to the wish list of all my friends at Amazon, it means there's room for RedLightGreen to grow there.
I've been forwarded a news clipping from the BBC by a co-worker. "A Search Engine for the World's Poor," is the title, and it relates, "Researchers at MIT are designing a search engine geared to the needs of computer users in the world's disadvantaged countries, most of whom have only sporadic access to the Web at what are often less-than-optimal bandwidths." The clipping is about the TEK project; my co-worker suggests that we would do the same -- develop an e-mail interface to our search engines. It seems this could also be useful for complicated searches for which we haven't optimized the system. There are "data mining"-like queries i can imagine being of use to a researcher -- not RLG's primary audience of librarians, but academics who are interested in, say, the rate of new editions for classic authors. We have the data the researcher may be interested in, but we haven't optimized the system to retrieve it. By running the query in the background over some length of time and returning it by e-mail, a complicated query is possible.