Citegeist

Information Capillaries

// February 26th, 2008 // Libraries, Library Systems, Web Stuff

Someone I recently started following on Twitter sent a message pointing to this blog post a couple of weeks ago. The post,* by self-proclaimed “accidental technologist” (and, NB: Mac User) JP Rangaswami, describes how FoxyTunes, TwittyTunes and tinyURL work together to enrich posts to Twitter. Sounds boring, but it’s really pretty elegant: FoxyTunes is an extension to the Firefox browser that provides an interface to popular media players, including web-based internet radio sites Pandora and Last.fm. TwittyTunes is an extension that works in tandem with FoxyTunes, allowing a user to post song and artist names and FoxyTunes URLs directly to Twitter. TinyURL neatly wraps it all up by shortening the FoxyTunes URL to keep it within Twitter 140-character limit. The result? Instead of having to type and send “iTunes: INXS – ‘Burn for You’”, I can click on the TwittyTunes icon and send that information and the FoxyTunes URL, which leads curious followers to information about the band, YouTube videos, lyrics to the song, web search results on the band’s name, links to other songs by the band, flickr photos, and more. Pretty cool, huh? Visit Rangaswami’s post for screenshots and a more eloquent explanation of Why This Rocks.

I bring it to your attention, Dear Reader, to start a conversation about how this idea could be applied to the library world. My Twitter community consists of roughly 100 friends, most of whom are in the library technology sector. Twitter is very much a social tool for me, but it is so much more than listserv-meets-chatroom: most of the library bloggers that I follow post links when they publish a new blog post or when they run across something in the blogosphere worth sharing. During the recent ALA Midwinter meeting, one of my Twitter friends, Lauren Pressley repeated to Twitter a question posed to the Emerging Technologies Interest Group meeting in which she was sitting and to which I was scurrying in the rain: “What represents an emerging technology today?” From my cell phone on the streets of Philadelphia, I answered: “Something I learn about on Twitter.” It was a flip reply, but totally true, and Lauren agreed.

So, what would it look like to extend the FoxyTunes/TwittyTunes functionality into the library world? What sorts of information do we share with our like-minded circles or with users that would benefit from automated enrichment, either with information on the open web or information that libraries pay for?

In the Blogosphere

How about an extension to Bloglines or Google Reader that allows me to post title, author, blog link and related info link to Twitter? The missing (?) application here would look at the blog author and URL and construct a page of related information: a list of recent posts and comments via RSS, a snippet from the author’s “About” page, flickr image results, a meebo chat widget to the author, Amazon links to books he or she has written, YouTube or blip.tv links, links to Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace profiles where appropriate. One could argue that all this information could live on the blog itself, but what is presented is chosen by each author and is often subject not only to his or her desires for sharing such information (which is of course fine) but also to the author’s technical ability or time that he or she is able to devote to upkeep.

Sharing Findings

Say I am doing research with colleagues and find an article that should be included in the literature review section, when we get around to writing our article. Building on the FoxyTunes model, I would need a browser extension that can read citation information from a number of citation management sites as widely varying as EndNote Web, RefWorks, Reference Manager, Zotero, del.icio.us, or even a locally-created database, as long as there were a standard set of fields. Layer the OpenURL standard onto this extension and I suddenly have a way to link to nearly limitless related information, the first being the full text of the item itself, and other items by this author; other items with certain keywords; other articles from the same journal issue or title; frequency of citation of this article, author or journal; my local library holdings by this author, of this journal or on this topic. Those familiar with OpenURL link resolvers such as SFX will recognize that as a laundry list of many of the capabilities standard to those products. Add content made possible by Web 2.0, the Read/Write web, user-generated content–whatever label you want to use–my deli.cio.us bookmarks related to this research topic; blog posts about this author or topic; web search results for this author, journal or topic; the wikipedia entry for this author or topic. What about web-accessible information about the author him- or herself, such as videos posted to YouTube of recent presentations or podcasts of same? Photographs on flickr or screencasts on SlideShare created by the author? Here, I think we start to get a sense of an author as a human being rather than as a byline. How will this change the research process, if at all?

I strayed quite a bit from my original point there: what is needed is a souped-up version of Zotero that can generate a URL linking to all this (freely-accessible, of course) content goodness, then a TwitterBib extension to send whatever author and title information it can fit into a tweet along with a TinyURL.

Strictly tweeting

I think there is a direct parallel between sharing enriched information to Twitter regarding a single song and sharing enriched information to Twitter regarding a single book.

How could openURL, web 2.0 features, next gen catalogs and library websites work together to give enriched information? Would our users be interested in receiving citation information via Twitter? There’s lots more to think about.

*Rangaswami’s post invokes nearly a dozen “web 2.0″ tools, but that term is nowhere to be found. Are we officially Over It? If so, what do we call this many-legged, quantum-shifting thing that the web is becoming?