BookLamp offers an interesting and (ahem) novel idea when it comes to finding books.
Those familiar with Pandora know that it works by analyzing a musician or song that you like and making choices for new songs based on the artist, style, beat, and other musical elements. BookLamp seeks to do that, but with books. Through the analysis of things like writing style, word use, and the like, BookLamp tries to make recommendations for further based on similarities between the book you selected and other books within its database.
A video on their site explains everything in greater detail.
They’ve only got a few items in the database, but they’re looking to grow… and hopefully have their idea purchased by Google.
BookLamp
The idea that this guy is creating is over at BookLamp.org The other day when the initial story was on LISNEWS I read the idea and thought it was interesting but not interesting enough to follow through and look at Booklamp.org or the video that explains the idea. Later that day I did go watch the video and I am glad I did. The idea behind Booklamp.org is an interesting one. I suggest that all librarians see the video.
As I was watching the Booklamp.org video I thought to myself, “Self, these type of applications like Booklamp, the library community should be building some of these.”
If we can’t do things like this as individual libraries then it should be happening through national library associations or from independent teams of librarians and programmers.
To borrow from communism I think that the workers should own and control the means of production. For libraries and librarians I think these means that there should be a series of tools that are used by librarians and the general public that have been created by librarians. On some fronts we do this already. The libraries that we have built and maintain are the tools that the public use but I think there needs to be more online tools created by librarians. And what I think is especially important is that these tools be attributed to the library community. Having people be aware that these tools would not exist without librarians.
Apologies
Oops! Sorry for the duplicate post. I took a quick look to see if this had gone up and I must have missed it.
Sorry folks!
Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes. Tycho (Jerry Holkins) @ Penny Arcade