http://www.librarian.net putting the rarin back in librarian since 1999 Fri, 10 Feb 2012 04:37:42 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 http://www.librarian.net/stax/2341/why-id-try-an-api/ http://www.librarian.net/stax/2341/why-id-try-an-api/#comments Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:47:34 +0000 jessamyn http://www.librarian.net/?p=2341 A few neat announcements in libraryland concerning data or connectors being made more open and available. These two examples may not seem as linked as they are.

• LibraryThing releases (sort of) (almost) a million book covers, free for your use, under most circumstances. You can also cache the covers locally as long as you don’t do it in such a way that you support LT competitors. While I understand why this isn’t linked with the Open Library project, I’d love to see it get there in the future sometime. update: John Miedema reminds me in the comments that I’d meant to also link to the openbook WordPress plugin for people using WordPress.
• WorldCat released their search API over the weekend. As with many OCLC things, this is great news for their member libraries and not that great for anyone else, but it’s a real step towards letting (their) people get at their data, not just their web pages. You can get some details, in slightly dense format, on this page.

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