I contacted the group behind the Indiegogo campaign on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/davesgonechina/status/596148115465371649
1.
1. *Caravan Studios* @*caravanstudios*
<https://twitter.com/caravanstudios> May 2
<https://twitter.com/caravanstudios/status/594226589631533056>
Help us raise $10K to put #*libraries*
<https://twitter.com/hashtag/libraries?src=hash> locations & hours in
#*Rangeapp* <https://twitter.com/hashtag/Rangeapp?src=hash> & help
youth find free #*summermeals*
<https://twitter.com/hashtag/summermeals?src=hash> & #*safeplaces*
<https://twitter.com/hashtag/safeplaces?src=hash> http://
bit.ly/rangecampaign <http://t.co/Pq9Nmi8nQT>
<https://twitter.com/caravanstudios/status/594226589631533056> 11
retweets 8 favorites
1.
*davesgonechina* @*davesgonechina*
<https://twitter.com/davesgonechina>
@*caravanstudios* <https://twitter.com/caravanstudios> also, library
hours change often, budgets get cut. Is $10K enuff 2 run regular scrapes
for years, or is this a one-off?
0 retweets 0 favorites
11:02 AM - 7 May 2015
Tweet text
Reply to @caravanstudios <https://twitter.com/caravanstudios>
1. *Caravan Studios* @*caravanstudios*
<https://twitter.com/caravanstudios> 7h7 hours ago
<https://twitter.com/caravanstudios/status/596400357242077184>
.@*davesgonechina* <https://twitter.com/davesgonechina> this is a one
time push for this summer. We'll open up the system so librarians can
update their own data next year.
<https://twitter.com/caravanstudios/status/596400357242077184> 1
retweet 0 favorites
2.
3. *davesgonechina* @*davesgonechina*
<https://twitter.com/davesgonechina> 3h3 hours ago
<https://twitter.com/davesgonechina/status/596461555710955520>
@*caravanstudios* <https://twitter.com/caravanstudios> that presumes
librarians have the bandwidth/inclination to update ur $10K DB. Just sayin.
<https://twitter.com/davesgonechina/status/596461555710955520> 0
retweets 1 favorite
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 1:33 AM, Dan Scott <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 8:15 AM, Ethan Gruber <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > +1 on the RDFa and schema.org. For those that don't know the library URL
> > off-hand, it is much easier to find a library website by Googling than it
> > is to go through the central university portal, and the hours will show
> up
> > at the top of the page after having been harvested by search engines.
>
>
> Hi, so this is an area that I've done, and am doing, a fair bit of work.
> See http://stuff.coffeecode.net/2015/ola_white_hat_seo/#/1/10 for some fun
> slides from a presentation I gave in January at the Ontario Library
> Association SuperConference that show some ways data gets into
> Google/Yahoo/Bing and concludes that the OCLC Registry "manually maintain
> yet another copy of your data elsewhere" approach isn't working. (Hit "s"
> to get speaker notes).
>
> The rest of the presentation goes into depth on how to use RDFa to mark up
> a real library web page with location, contact info, opening hours, and
> event info. And I've posited that crawling library sites to pull
> single-sourced data (e.g. you update your website to provide updated hours
> to humans, and the machines automatically benefit) would be a much more
> effective, accurate, and usable approach than maintaining copies of the
> data in Google+, OCLC Registry, etc. We could produce results like
> http://cwrc.ca/rsc-src/ that stay accurate, rather than being one-off
> efforts that decay over time. (It would be great if the OCLC Registry had a
> "crawl this URL" option so that it could keep all of its data up-to-date
> and incentive libraries to publish the data in a machine-readable format
> such as RDFa + schema.org.)
>
> On the "but that's technically challenging" front, I tried pursuing some
> grant funding to produce templates for publishing that structured info in
> Drupal, Joomla, and other commonly used CMSs. Sadly, my application was
> recently denied, but that will only slow me down; I'm not going to give up
> on the goal. I have a paper in the works that will expand on the content of
> the presentation for those sites that have the ability (technical and
> administrative) to modify their own web pages.
>
> Sites running the Evergreen library system already generate a page for each
> of their libraries that contains this structured data (e.g.
> https://laurentian.concat.ca/eg/opac/library/OSUL), which is single
> sourced
> from the data that has to be maintained in the library system anyway.
>
> I'll happily acknowledge that getting search engines to harvest the right
> data is not easy, though: right now, for example, if you search for "J.N.
> Desmarais Library" it currently shows that the library is open 24 hours a
> day, which is completely false--probably maliciously
> submitted--information. *sigh* I've edited that info in the Google+ page at
> https://plus.google.com/+JNDesmaraisLibraryGreaterSudbury but even though
> it is a verified place and I am a manager of the G+ page, the edits still
> go through approval by Googlers. There appears to be no good way to tell
> Google "Hey, *this* is the URL you are looking for!". Somewhat amusingly,
> the entire reason I started working with schema.org dates back to an
> presentation I attended about Google Places years ago, where I whined about
> having to maintain yet another copy of data in yet another place, and the
> response inferred that schema.org might be the solution to that problem.
>
> Also, due to the structure of university web property ownership, we
> currently don't have the ability to modify our actual library home page to
> include any RDFa, which is a *wee* bit frustrating given my work in the
> field. Heh.
>
> Dan Scott
> Laurentian University
>
