Mastodawn

I've made a blog post out of my recent lightning talk at #c4l26, sharing some ideas I've been contemplating lately while in libraries and on trails.

The post includes my full text, links to sites and images shown in the talk, and some bonus links for context (including a book link that @platypus gave on the conference Slack channel).

My thanks again to the #Code4Lib community for hosting the event, and to everyone there for their contributions and participation!

https://everybodyslibraries.com/2026/03/06/trails-and-tours-in-library-online-environments/

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kcoyle checking the perimeter Mar 6

@JMarkOckerbloom
John, I really appreciate your efforts to expand the catalog and make it more informative! I do wish that WorldCat's "Identities" was still live because it had some great data mining visuals that I think give users a quick overview of some aspects buried in catalog data. I also like the visuals in the OpenLibrary (like: https://openlibrary.org/subjects/eco_umberto_1932-2016). Ironically, if we want to data-mine, we have to hope that someone grabbed the Anna's Archive files.

Eco, umberto, 1932-2016 | Open Library

Open Library is an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published. Read, borrow, and discover more than 3M books for free.

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John Mark Ockerbloom

@kcoyle Thanks! Yes, the Open Library is doing some interesting visualizations as well.

I think there are some promising alternatives for bibliographic data mining either in existence or in the works, including the increasing amount of material at id.loc.gov, Wikidata, and OpenAlex for article data. And if Blue Core succeeds, that should also provide a good open source of data about a year from now.

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kcoyle checking the perimeter Mar 6

@JMarkOckerbloom Putting a link here to Blue Core presentations because it looks promising and I hadn't heard about it:
https://bluecore.info/presentations

Presentations about Blue Core

The Blue Core Project envisions a new library metadata environment with linked data at its core that is cooperatively shaped and owned, eliminating the need for every institution to establish linked data tooling locally.

A Community-Operated, Shared BIBFRAME Datastore