We are looking at including MAJAX on our Millenium Server. It is a Javascript library for making requests to Millenium from within pages elsewhere on your site. This is a placeholder for me to remember where the docs are...

• Here’s the MAJAX homepage
• Here’s a description on how to install
• Here’s a demo page that shows all the classes it can provide
• Here’s a demo of a class at VT that lists course resources w/ MAJAX

Our library recently switched from using Syndetics images for the cover images in our OPAC to using Amazon's free cover images. The cost? Linking to Amazon... The benefits = free, high speed image servers optimized for a global beating, item details, "look inside", more like this, etc...

Because III's (our OPAC provider) linking works by serving the first "standard number" in the catalog record, these links and images try to show up on every record that has a standard number, regardless of whether there is an image available on Amazon's server or not. So, I wrote a quick php gateway which uses Amazon's Associates Web Services to determine whether Amazon has a record of that item in their DB. Only if they do, does the script send the browser on to grab the image for the cover. Otherwise, it just displays a "no image available" image or a blank GIF (in the cases where Amazon has no information at all).

Our "Ask a Librarian" folk have seen info about a few pilot SMS -> email reference projects relying on gateway services like the one provided by Altarama in Australia. These were done in early to late 2005-2006 [more info] My colleagues and I are curious about what we could try and do with some of the (much less expensive) new email to SMS gateway web applications that have started to proliferate in the states.

Examples include:

• Joopz
• Teleflip
• Twitterbot

We manage the Avoice Online digital collection for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. They recently asked if the items in their collection could be made to work properly with Zotero being developed at George Mason University. It bills itself as a "next generation" research tool for the humanities and it IS pretty interesting. It allows you to collect bibliographic citations, sites that you want to refer back to, and actual digital resources that you annotate in your own collection. Definitely worth a look if you haven't seen it.

[Zotero's site]

Just a quick update on my day job... for those of you who know my "other" me.

I have been appointed the Interim Head of the Technology Integration Services unit at the University of Texas Libraries. This unit is in the User Services division and we will be supporting the web site and all of the various web related service venues (probably blackboard, wikis, blogs, and other widgets, plugins, and tubes...) that we can. Now that we are moving out from underneath the recent catalog launch and are finally finishing up the last of the UTOPIA projects, we shall see what we get into.