I found this week’s readings very helpful. I had tried HubMed casually before, but I think eTBLAST will be even more helpful. I may even use it for a project I am working on right now.
The Mashup I chose to explore was the Oral Histories of Route 66 Map. The multimedia map with the video interviews is very impressive. It makes curious about how many museums and archives may have developed their own mashups for their oral histories and online exhibits. I think I will do some more exploring of the programmable web site to see if I can find similar history applications. Perhaps there is potential for our library’s Special Collections and Archives Department to develop something similar.
When I did the Rollyo search of librarianblogs for privacy, most of the postings seemed to be at least a year old. There was a great variety. Several seemed to deal with the USA Patriot Act and its reauthorization. Another dealt with RFIDs. In honor of this weeks topic, I decided to do a search on mashups. Not surprisingly, every post listed on the first page of results was authored by either Michelle Kraft or David Rothman. One of Michelle’s posts asked where all the library mashups are–if they are too technical to create or if librarians are the victims of closed system architecture. I think it may be a little of both. For me, it is also a time factor. I would like to develop mashups that would be useful to my patrons and perhaps save me time in my duties, but taking the time to propose and develop these tools takes away time that I need to spend on my regular liaison duties. There are obviously plenty of great mashups out there for increasing the capabilities of PubMed. As nursing liaison, I would like to see a mashup that would work with EBSCOHost’s CINAHL and ISI’s Web of Science, but again, closed architecture is probably an issue.
I created a Rollyo account and intended to create my own Searchroll, but I discovered others have already created search rolls for the things I am currently interested in searching. Perhaps I will discover the need to create a new search roll in the future.
