BoogyWoogy — an homage to
Piet Mondrian —
lets you explore Harvard Library's collection of almost 13 million items as serendipitiously as you would like.
Begin by entering a term to search for. After that, clicking on a filled-in square will fetch items that are like it. But you get to
use the Serendipity Slider to decide what "like it" means. At one end, you'll get items within the same official subject.
At the other, you'll get items just barely related, or perhaps not related at all.
To explore any item, right-click on it (or whatever button you use to get a context menu) and confirm that you want to see it
in
StackLife, a very cool library browser that works with a prior version of LibraryCloud,
the open metadata server that is also behind this little app.
In fact, BoogyWoogy is intended just as a demonstration of a little of the power of Harvard LibraryCloud, the server technology that's underneath BoogyWoogy's
too-bright colors. You can find out more about LibraryCloud
here. (And please note
that this app was written by a non-developer. Just a hobbyist. Which, come to think of it, is one of the reasons we're building
LibraryCloud. So, have fun!
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BoogyWoogy is a demo written by a hobbyist to try out and show off some of the capabilities of
Harvard LibraryCloud.
LibraryCloud makes openly available Harvard's information about the almost thirteen million
items in its combined collections (73 libraries plus a large off-campus repository), and more.
Any developer can use this rich set of information to create applications like BoogyWoogy (except
better) without asking permission or making special arrangements. LibraryCloud is at this point (Sept. 2014)
a prototype that we hope will become a maintained part of Harvard Library's infrastructure.
BoogyWoogy is an Open Source project (as is LibraryCloud). It builds on an idea from Jeff Goldenson. The laughable source code is on
Github. If you hit bugs (you will) or have suggestions, send an email
to me at
[email protected]. Thanks! -- David Weinberger, Sept. 25, 2014
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