Amazon Web Services in the Library

e-Commerce site Amazon is one of the best-known examples of an organisation offering 'web services' that allow third parties to make use of their data and infrastructure in new applications outside Amazon's control. What might libraries do with these web services? Read on for some current examples and future possibilities, then share your own experiences here.

The first stop for anyone thinking about using Amazon's extensive set of web services must surely be their own blog, where the team announces new features and points to interesting examples of the web services in use.

One of the most common library applications at the moment is building upon the innovative work Jon Udell did with LibraryLookup, which I last wrote about on our Panlibus blog back in January.

Jon's idea was to provide a mechanism whereby someone viewing a web page about a book on Amazon could easily check to see whether or not the book was available to borrow from their local library. Simple, yet brilliant.

The current generation of innovations, from Ed Vielmetti, Dave Pattern and many more, add to Jon's original idea and use the Greasemonkey scripting extension to the Firefox web browser in order to display information right on the Amazon page.

As reported by Richard Wallis on Panlibus earlier this year, and followed up by me last month, we are leveraging the power of one of the evolving Platform components (a Directory) to ensure that these capabilities aren't only available on a library-by-library basis as someone takes the effort to write each library-specific script, but that they can be leveraged across practically any library, significantly lowering the barrier to entry, and allowing a far greater number of librarians to bring these capabilities to their library members.

Our Whisper research demonstrator also shows some of that which becomes possible here...

What are you doing with Amazon Web Services, and what might you like to do?

Why not Contribute your Greasemonkey and other scripts here?