Talis announced the winners of their first competition on library mashups, intended to "openly encourage innovation in the display, use, and reuse of data from and about libraries"

Eighteen entries were submitted to the competition. These mashups included everything things like simple enhancements to existing library functions to mashups that provide library services inside the Second Life 3D online digital world. Entries came in from public and academic libraries, as well as from the commercial sector. (No Medical Libraries!? Come on medical library techie people, there has got to be something you can create using available APIs.)

All eighteen entries are described in detail at www.talis.com/tdn/forum/84

Winners of Mashing Up The Library 2006

First: John Blyberg of Ann Arbor District Library in Ann Arbor, MI. His entry, Go-Go-Google-Gadget, shows how simply library information can be integrated into the personalized home page offered by Google. Talis' Paul Miller, described it as "an excellent example of taking information previously locked inside the library catalogue and making it available to patrons in other contexts where they may spend more time than they do in their catalogue." Available information includes new and the most popular material in the library, and patron-specific information on checked-out and requested items.

Second: Alliance Library System in East Peoria, IL, and their global partners in the Second Life Library. Their entry, the Alliance Second Life Library 2.0, was described by Talis' Miller as "both a testament to international co-operation amongst libraries and a compelling demonstration of the ways in which traditional library functions can be extended into cyberspace, reaching new audiences in ways exciting and relevant to them as they live their lives."

As I mentioned in my August 31, 2006 post I am going to be writing an article on mashups for medical libraries. Here are some that I have discovered or others that have been submitted to me.

pgcomments.user.js - is a Greasemonkey script that adds blog post trackbacks to PubMed. The blog Flags and Lollipops describes the mashup a little more and provides a page to try it out on. (update: today this is giving XML related errors on the PubMed side - that's nothing to do with the script, really.)

http://www.biowizard.com/search.aspx PubMed Wizard - allows you "save, share, rank, and discuss your favorite papers." Take a look how the search results are displayed identical in style to PubMed. However, PubMed Wizard includes little links at the bottom of the citation indicating the discussionussion threads, and sharing the sharing abstract. The links Related, Email, and Save are all available on PubMed but they are located in a convenient location for doctors to notice.

http://www.gopubmed.org/ - "Your query is submitted to PubMed and the resulting abstracts are classified using Gene Ontology terms. Gene Ontology is a hierarchical vocabulary for molecular biology covering cellular components, biological processes and molecular functions. You can use the Gene Ontology to systematically explore your search results."

http://ebounce.info/ -"ebounce.info is an (experimental, "garage band" quality) website offering free online tools for purposes related to gathering, sorting, presenting and digesting of information, mostly related to health and science. They are all in evolving phase (plus more information sources are on their way to be added)."

http://www.healthia.com/pricing/ -Healthia mashup for comparing hospital prices and different medical procedures. Displays hospitals and their charges.

I do not endorse any of the products nor have I had much time to really review them (I am in the hunter gatherer phase of my research). But as you can see all of these mashups are directly related to the medical world and also the medical library world. A mashup is an application using APIs from multiple websites and merging them to form new, innovative applications. One thing I have noticed is that it is sometimes hard to discover whether something is a mashup or not. Because truly good mashups appear to be seamless. You don't realize that the application you are using is actually made from multiple other application and websites. So please continue to submit any mashups that you have discovered.