Kia ora Tim,

There's a challenge that floats around to read a book from every country in the world. The problem is to try and find a list of books by, say, Azerbaijani authors - if you search a library catalogue for fiction -- Azerbaijan you're going to come up with a lot of books by US authors who may never have even visited the country.

I ended up using Wikidata to create a proof-of-concept at https://deborahfitchett.com/toys/aroundtheworld/ but you can see how limited the results are for some countries: they've got a great free and flexible query service (the flexibility means it'd be trivial to instead query for books by librarians, or books that are the first in a trilogy, or books published in a city that was hosting the Olympics that year, or...) but at the moment they don't have a lot of data about specific book titles.

So... LibraryThing could have an API that lets people do some of this kind of query based on your Common Knowledge data.

And/or... you could donate some of your data to Wikidata and help build up the linked open data there. You'd want to figure out what data should be 'free' and what data you want to keep as your value-add, but even just adding the core bibliographic data (eg the title, author/editor, date of first publication, and some identifier whether an ISBN or Worldcat ID or whatever to aid people with future matching) would be a massive contribution. You could then also pull back the Wikidata identifier into LibraryThing, and link between the records, and thereby benefit from any additional data the community adds on the Wikidata side; and it would offload some of the burden of scraping to the Wikidata servers. 😊 I've previously done a collaborative project uploading data on 65,000-odd theses to Wikidata so I've got some contacts that can point in the right direction if this is something you're interested in exploring.

Ngā mihi,

Deborah


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From: Code for Libraries <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Tim Spalding
Sent: Wednesday, August 28, 2024 8:43 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CODE4LIB] APIs and Mashups / LibraryThing

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TL;DR: Is anyone still using library- and book-related APIs? If you could have an API to anything known to LibraryThing, what would you want?

I'm revamping LibraryThing's APIs, and am interested in what the Code4Lib community is thinking about APIs and mashups today. Is anyone doing anything interesting, or is this an idea from the past?

On the one hand, I remember the heady days of cool book APIs and library mashups. I contributed a chapter to Nicole Engard's book "Library Mashups."
I want to be part of a supportive community of people doing cool things.
Making new APIs for that is worth it to me.

On the other, LibraryThing has had to shut down many of its free APIs because they saw almost no "good" use—just a lot of abusive scraping. I want to make cool APIs for library- and book-people doing interesting things with books. I don't want to help jerks with crappy or dangerous "free ebook" sites populate their data. Whatever we do, it has to have clear limits.

So what's your feeling?

Secondarily, if you had access to everything LibraryThing knows—twenty years of direct and implied user data about books, some 70m MARC records(1) and so forth—what would you want an API to? We sell some of what he have already, in services like Syndetics Unbound(2), and we aren't going to provide free APIs to a paid product, but there's a lot we can do for libraries without any commercial concerns.

Best,
Tim
LibraryThing

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