Word smatter

Books, books, books

I’ve played with a sample of my personal book data in the past, and really wanted to once (but not for all, by any stretch) get my entire home book collection usable as a fun dataset to feed into Solr.  Thanks to LibraryThing and Delicious Library I have succeeded in very quickly getting the bulk of the books in my house scanned.  First, I purchased a Cue Cat scanner from LibraryThing.  Then I scanned them into my lifetime LibraryThing account.  Unfortunately the export from LibraryThing doesn’t give me as much info as I’d like (subject headings/genres), so I exported the LibraryThing data (through some basic spreadsheet manual massaging) into Delicious Library.  I’m not sure why, but Delicious Library 2 didn’t do the trick of refreshing the data from Amazon, but Delicious Library 1 did.  Then exported that to a tab-delimited file, which is easily indexable into Solr from there.

I had guessed there’d be around 1000 books in my house, but it turns out that was a bit high - ended up scanning in around 680 books.  There are a number of books that aren’t in Amazon or Library of Congress lookups though, so the LibraryThing collection of mine isn’t entirely complete.

I’ve added a LibraryThing sidebar on my Tumblr site, to show some random covers.

The fun now begins to do something with this data.  First stop will be to use it in my Solr Boot Camp class next week at ApacheCon EU.

I took some book shelf photos that I’ve uploaded to Flickr.

I love books!

Divergent convergence

I’m leaving tomorrow for my favoritist conference ever.  Librarians and library geeks are the best people in the world.  I *heart* books and book-loving people.

This year, I volunteered to introduce Tuesday’s keynote speaker, my good friend Stefano Mazzocchi. I’ve been re-reading his great linotype site, CV, and reminding myself of why I admire him so much.  The work he did at SIMILE, not just the heavy lifting of creating powerful and clean semwebby things, but most of all how he presents it all.  Looking back at the volume of his work, there is a common theme of useful elegance in it all.

Stefano recently posted some thoughts on convergent and divergent thinking.  I’ve often given a great deal of thought, and even software development time, to these approaches to decision making.  I used to work for GroupSystems.com though I imagine the old ASP front-end to a Citrix-based Win16 MSWIN application that I worked on is no longer in service, but their ThinkTank stuff looks pretty much like it (which is to say the old stuff looked good too!).   The Brainstormer widget sounds interesting.

Thanks, Stefano, for the inspirations you’ve provided to many including myself.  It’s an honor to get to introduce you on Tuesday.

I’m looking forward to convergence at code4lib 2009.