Koha, the bacon donut ILS.
Monday, March 31st, 2008 by atzLast month in Portland, Oregon at the code4lib 2008 convention (a most impressive assemblage of library geekiness), a few of us broke out to the 24-hour bakery Voodoo Doughnut for this:
A donut, with bacon on it. A bacon donut.
I’d expected it to be strange, but the remarkable thing about the bacon donut is how unsurprising the taste is. The sweet maple and salty flavors are, as it turns out, very compatible. So it strikes me that the work I’ve been doing on Koha recently is a lot like the bacon donut: take two things people already like, we do the voodoo and make them work together in a new way.
For the OPAC, the place where this comes up most often is external content, like book cover images. Koha libraries have been using jacket images from Amazon for some time in production, internationally. It’s free and it’s broadly populated: a great feature, especially for small libraries who don’t have the advantage of a lot of subscription content services. Using their API, we can also pull and display content like user reviews, really fleshing out OPAC content.
I recently completed some commissioned Koha code for integrating Baker & Taylor images and content as an alternative to Amazon. Koha can now link to B&T ContentCafe excerpts, ratings, etc. and to their MyLibrary BookStore retail site. For design, my code followed the Amazon model, and certainly something similar could be crafted for other proprietary sources like Blackwell, Syndetics, etc. But upon reflection, I think that the entire model is already on it’s way out!
Enter Google Book Services. I’ll have more to say about GBS later, but suffice to say we now have a second, very widely available source of free book jacket images. (In fact, it may be enough to deflect calls some have been making for the Library of Congress to provide access to cover images like they do for other metadata.) The Google API is essentially javascript based and remarkably easy to integrate. How easy? Code4lib members were posting working example code back and forth within hours, and then within a day or two, other Koha users adapted their own servers to start using Google’s images. This is a great example of how OSS enables agility and adaptability.
So pretty soon we should expect that every current OPAC will have some images from somewhere, and that won’t be a distinguishing feature anymore. The next model to evolve will be to allow ajaxy failover from a ranked menu of many possible image sources (both free and subscription/keyed like B&T/syndetics). In fact, several coders have reported implementing this for their favorite sources already! I’m looking forward to seeing this code synthesized, providing the broadest possible coverage for images. Then we can start to get some abstraction around the other data in common, like reviews, ratings, etc.
Some of my colleagues have already started on LibraryThing and xISBN. If you have other external data sources you would like to see integrated in Koha, feel free to mention them here!
