Reading List Hackathon - a Summary

On Thursday and Friday of last week, I attended a Reading List Hackathon run by DevCSI, at the Møller Centre, Cambridge. The event was designed to encourage the hacking of library information systems and reading list software.

We looked at two major pieces of reading list software:

• Telstar

and

• List8D

with talks from Mendeley (who provide citation software), Talis (who provide library software and reading list software, amongst other things) and Emerald (a publisher who are creating peer-reviewed reading lists as a free service).

After these talks, we got together into teams, and started hacking, creating, amongst other things:

• a way of pushing Emerald RSS feeds through Yahoo pipes, allowing filtered searching
• some extensions to List8D
• Six degrees of Harry Potter, which used Talis API data to generate a graph of degrees of separation
• Compare the Citation: a teaching tool to educate undergraduates about citation styles
• an extension to a library catalogue, showing availability of items on a reading list
• an extension to List8D, allowing users to display citations in different styles
• using the Talis APIs in List8D
• Llikes, a tool to reorder a reading list based on social metrics
  

I'll write a couple of blog posts detailing what people said in their talks, and more about what was created during the event.

But basically, I had a really good time; I discovered lots of new things; some really cool and interesting things were created, and I'd love to go to a similar event again.

Reading List Hackathon

One of the things we're interested in doing is innovating ways to disseminate and manage Reading Lists.

Our latest widget, the Reference List widget I mentioned last week, covers a related but slightly different use case to Reading Lists. Reading Lists are much more broad, and could include published books, journals, local (e.g. departmental) reading material etc; whereas the Reference List widget caters for lists of citations in a very well defined format.

Right now one of our team members, Verity, is at a DevCSI workshop exploring the interoperability between reading list software and other software systems - we'll let you know of any useful things she picks up at the Hackathon.