E-MAIL | PRINT | SAVE | LICENSE   

By Nicole Engard

Whenever someone mentions the term 'mashup' I inevitably think of two things, 'Monster Mash' and mashed potatoes. Don't ask me why; I know what a mashup is. I edited an entire book on mashups this past year and the fact is that a mashup is nothing like either the song or the food.

The term mashup has its origin in pop music, where people seamlessly combine music from one song with the vocal track from another, thereby mashing them together to create something completely new. When it comes to technology mashups, we're talking about taking data from one source and mashing it together with data from another to create a unique online tool.

According to data from ProgrammableWeb (www.programmableweb.com) collected on August 27, 2009, the most popular type of mashup is a map mashup. A map mashup is quite simply made up of data from one or more sources, which is then plotted on a map. Hillsborough County Public Library Cooperative in Florida does a particularly good job with this (www.hcplc.org/hcplc/liblocales/).

Introduction to Library Mashups
Library Mashups: Exploring new ways to deliver library data (http://mashups.web2learning.net) is a compilation of chapters by 25 librarians around the world who have used mashups within their organisations to improve services to their patrons. Each chapter includes first-hand experiences and tips for using outside data sources to enhance library offerings.



Fig. 1: Book Jacket

Some of the examples in the book are as simple as filling in a form and copying and pasting a snippet of code, like some of the examples in Chapter 6, Mashing up the Library Website by Lichen Rancourt. Others are a bit more complicated like the chapters in section 3, Mashing up Catalog Data.

Using Yahoo! Pipes to Mashup Library Data
Yahoo! Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com) offers a service to help those who might not know how to program to create mashups with a graphical interface. Using Yahoo! Pipes, you can create a simple text mashup, a map mashup or even a photo mashup. If you're not sure how to do something, you can search through mashups created by others and see how they did it.

I'm going to walk you through creating two different types of pipes that you can easily use on your library website to provide additional services to your patrons. The first is just a simple mashup of area news.

Creating a News Mashup
Many library sites like to include local news on their homepage; wouldn't it be great if you could grab this data dynamically from several different sources so that your homepage is always up to date? Using the simplest form of pipe you can do this.

Yahoo! Pipes is a service of Yahoo! and so requires that you register for a Yahoo! account before getting started. Once your account is created and you're logged into http://pipes.yahoo.com you will see a blue ‘Create a pipe' button at the top of the screen. Click that button to create your first pipe.

Before you can go any further you will need to find the RSS feed URLs for the news sites you're interested in compiling data from. Most websites denote RSS feeds with an orange button.



Fig. 2: Feed Icon

Once you have the URL for the RSS feed you can bring it into Yahoo! Pipes to start gathering information.

On the left hand side of your screen you will notice that there are several menu items. Clicking on a menu item will expand the menu to provide you with several operations. To make our news mashup we're going to click on the ‘Sources' menu and then drag the ‘Fetch Feed' from the menu over into the white area to the right. You will notice that once you drag an option from the left to the right a ‘Pipe Output' bubble appears in the white area along with the one you drug over.

We now want to put our RSS feed URL in the ‘Fetch Feed' box. To add additional feeds you can click the plus sign to the left of the ‘URL' label. Once you have all of your feeds added you probably want to do a bit of filtering on your data to make sure that the most accurate information is being printed to your homepage. To put results in reverse chronological order (so that the most recent news appears at the top) you can drag the ‘Sort' option out from under the ‘Operators' menu into the white area.

Now comes the pipe part. To connect the data bubble to the sort bubble, you need to click on the round button at the bottom of ‘Fetch Feed' and drag it to connect to the round button at the top of ‘Sort.' Once that is done, a pipe will connect the two bubbles and the sort menu will be filled in with fields available for sorting.



Fig. 3: Sort Menu

For our purposes, we want to sort our pipe by publication date and so we pick ‘item.pubDate' in 'descending' order.

The final step is to connect ‘Sort' to ‘Pipe Output.' This is done by clicking on the round button at the bottom of ‘Sort' and dragging it to connect to the round button at the top of ‘Pipe Output.'




Fig. 4 Full Pipe Image

To see the results from your pipe, click ‘Save' at the top right and then ‘Run Pipe...' at the top center.

You can also see this pipe in action at http://pipes.yahoo.com/nengard/uknews

Creating a Map Mashup
Now that you understand how to drag and drop options around the Yahoo! Pipes interface, you can create a slightly more complex mashup, like a map of all libraries in your area. In addition to the ability to pull in data from RSS feeds, Yahoo! Pipes includes the ability to grab data from various other sources, among which is Yahoo! Local (http://maps.yahoo.com).

It is important to note that Yahoo! Pipes does not yet allow for Yahoo! map mashups outside of the US.

For a map pipe you will need to choose ‘Yahoo! Local' from the ‘Sources' menu and drag that into the editing area. The ‘Yahoo! Local' bubble asks for two values: a search term and a location. You can enter the location as a postal code, address or city and state. I'm going to enter ‘library' within '20 miles' of ‘Philadelphia, PA' to find libraries in and around the city.



Fig. 5: Map Pipe

To generate the map, simply connect the ‘Yahoo! Local' bubble to the ‘Pipe Output' bubble, save the pipe and run it.




Fig. 6: Final Map Image

You can also see this pipe in action at http://pipes.yahoo.com/nengard/philalibs

Publishing Your Pipe
To bring this pipe into your website you have several options, the easiest of which is to use a ‘badge.'



Fig. 7: Menu of Options

From the pipe output screen you will need to make your pipe public by clicking ‘Publish' under the pipe address. Next, choose ‘Get as a Badge' above the results of your pipe. A badge is simply a snippet of HTML that you can add to your website.

The badge has several options, but to put the code on your website you want to choose the ‘Embed' option. This will generate a bit of code you can paste on to your website, or you can customise what is displayed by clicking the ‘Customize' link at the top of the badge pop up. Once you have everything the way you want it, simply copy the code generated by Yahoo! Pipes and paste it into your website.

Mashing Up Your Library
Yahoo! Pipes is just one of many tools you can use to create mashups for your library. To find what other data sources you can grab data from you can check out ProgrammableWeb's list of APIs (www.programmableweb.com/apis) or ask around at local libraries.

API stands for Application Programming Interface. An API spells out how to formulate a query for the data from a web service

With the rate of change on the Web, it can be very time-consuming keeping our websites up to date with relevant information; using mashups can help lighten the load and maybe even provide a new creative way to deliver information to our patrons.

Share Your Stories
If your library is doing something awesome with mashups, feel free to contact me (nengard@gmail.com) and let me know. I will gladly share your story on the Library Mashups blog (http://mashups.web2learning.net/blog).

More About the Book
Library Mashups: Exploring New Ways to Deliver Library Data (ISBN 978-1-57387-372-7) is a publication of Information Today Inc. and is also available for order in the United Kingdom, Europe or British Commonwealth (excl. Canada) from Facet Publishing. Links to purchase the book can be found on the official book website at http://mashups.web2learning.net

By Nicole Engard

Nicole C. Engard, MLIS, is the Director of Open Source Education at ByWater Solutions. Nicole has been published in several library journals and keeps librarians up-to-date on web technologies via her website "What I Learned Today...". She is also the editor of "Library Mashups," a book published by Information Today. Contact Nicole at nengard@gmail.com.

FUMSI articles by Nicole Engard »

Click here for copyright permissions!
Copyright 2010 Free Pint Limited

Related articles:

• Wikis at Sun Microsystems: The Ongoing Evolution
• Designing for the Social: Avoiding Anti-Social Networks
• Computers in Libraries 2009: Spreading Ideas
• Social media strategy: How I Became an Expert in Three Days
• Leveraging and Repurposing RSS

You may also be interested in:

• Subscribing to FUMSI »
  
  
• Browse the articles database for more Use articles »
  
  
• Search the articles database for more Use articles »
  
  
• Tools and reports for Using Information »