1776 Uses for Technology

Medical Mash Ups

Wow, a real library mash-up. I’m blown away by the first session on, “A Customizable ‘Mash-up’ for Model and Disease Organisms. If you are interested in mash-ups you should read the abstract which does a good job of describing the project.

The basics of the system
They are leveraging RSS from publishers and indexes ‘mashing the data together from these various sources.

The cool part
Taxonomically Intelligent Search Strategy. Whoa, they are mapping the subject headings from MeSH, NALT, so that they can link across the indexes.

This is cool, my only regret is not asking any questions. But then again, I was still trying to comprehend the system they created.

Library Toolbars

I like the idea of library toolbars. I’ve played with this technology and have made a few toolbars as an experiment. The question I have, will patrons use these toolbars? Will patrons even download the toolbars. UCSF has developed some toolbars for production so this was an interesting session. Over 1100 downs, that answers one question. The 6 months of stats have told them that there is a gradually upward trend but it is a trend of 600 percent. It is a small percentage compared to their over all Web traffic but that’s ok. I wouldn’t expect the traffic to be huge. I think this is a success and justifies the time they put into development. One enhancement that I think it critical is having the toolbar update itself, but they are developing that for the future.