Book Trackr

Please consider this an entry in the Mashing Up The Library 2006 competition. I have created a small app called Book Trackr. It provides feeds allowing a user to track the activity of a book in our library. (http://www.library.njit.edu/apps/voyagerdb/booktrackr/about.html)

Traditionally, a user would create a hold or recall event and receive an email notification upon availability. This model is limited by medium (email), by the triggering event (the discharge of a book), and by the goal (borrowing a book). There are many other ways in which a user would like to have a digital "interaction" with a book.

For example, a professor wants to see how often his/her books are borrowed. A librarian wants to easily "keep an eye on" books reported missing. A researcher has a list of 20 books they will eventually need to review, but rather than placing holds on all, they are content to watch their statuses and head to the library to borrow them on a less urgent basis. A faculty member wants to post course readings to her Learning Management System, and (oh, by the way) if her post could include always up-to-date location, call number, and availablity information, that would be great, too.

My original proposal for Book Trackr can be read as a Word doc at http://www.library.njit.edu/apps/voyagerdb/booktrackr/proposal-2006-05-17.doc

A demo showing feeds being pulled into a page via javascript can be seen at http://www.library.njit.edu/apps/voyagerdb/booktrackr/about.html

All information (including usage information) is being queried directly from the catalog tables.

Currently, the feeds are only available in an HTML package and only in the default style and format. In my original proposal, I described plans for RSS and XML packages, along with other style/formatting options. These will be coded in the next phase of development.

You can test the HTML feeds by following the instructions on this page: http://www.library.njit.edu/apps/voyagerdb/booktrackr/about.html

They are designed to work in a similar way to feeds provided by LibraryThing.com (http://www.librarything.com/blog/2006/01/librarything-adds-151440-rsshtml-feeds.php) or Flickr Badges (http://www.flickr.com/badge_new.gne). You can cut and paste the javascript onto your own web page, changing the ISBN to the book you want to track (please check our catalog first).

NOTE: Please don't use my feeds beyond a test until I have time to move it out of beta and into production in the next week or two. For one thing, they are recreated with every hit, so they take some 10 seconds to generate; I still have to turn the caching option on, so the feeds are only generated from scratch a few times a day. I don't want to have a heavy load on my server or application yet. Thanks.

--Jim Robertson, Assistant University Librarian, New Jersey Institute of Technology (USA)