Well, yesterday I finished up a working demo site of Story Starters for the National Science Digital Library. Doing that and teaching kept me too busy to blog. My plan is to make a more general and scalable demo for the world. Hopefully I can have that up by the end of the week. My intention is to also tie in Reference Extract.
Right now in Reference Extract you can search digital reference knowledge-bases and then extend your search to cited references.Like this:
DR Archives –> Cited Searches
No imagine, chaining more specific searches together, so now we can add blogs in Story Starters:
Blogs –> DR Archives –> Cited Searches
Making this capability generic, a local library could add their archives, and then extend to Reference Extract:
My Library –> DR Archives –> Cited Search
And one could continue to add more links:
My Library –> DR Archive –> Cited Search –> Google
The idea would be to make a general utility to tie these searches together in a seamless interface and allow any interface mix and match (and collapse) these chains based on a given user interface. So a library could go:
My Library –> Cited Search –> Google
etc.
Just an idea. Off to start the Story Starter site.
We’re in the process of developing a service called “Story Starters.” It is sort of a fun idea that grew out of an immediate need. The immediate need was a way to connect Blogs with our QABuilder software. Where we’ve ended up (for now) is a general blog starting service. A person or organization posts some list of items they want to be blogged about, and from within blogging software (WordPress to start with), can browse lists and pick the ones they want to blog about. The resulting blog entries are then aggregated and sent back to the posting agent…read more to see why this might be useful.