LibraryCloud API at Harvard

1. LibraryCloud
July 28, 2014 - ABCD

2. Agenda
● What is LibraryCloud?
● The API
● The architecture
● Q&A

3. What is LibraryCloud?
Metadata platform
Connect information flows underneath
Provide programmatic access on top

4. Who is it for?
LTS tool
Innovators/developers
Other sites & platforms that want to integrate
with library metadata

5. Example use cases
Custom OPAC (e.g., Stacklife)
Library analytics
Source of metadata for digital collections and exhibits
Specialized search engine
Integrate with Teaching & Learning Technologies
Recommendation engine (eventually)
Integrate with Web sources (e.g. NPR, Wikipedia)

6. Two versions
v1: Library Innovation Lab prototype
v2: Harvard Library
Workflow-based
Robust

7. The Item API

8. The Basics
Location: http://api.lib.harvard.edu/v2/items
Documentation:
https://wiki.harvard.edu/confluence/display/LibraryStaffDoc/Library+Cloud
13 million Aleph open access metadata
records in MODS format (XML or JSON)

9. Design Goals
● Easy to use
● Retain the richness of existing library data

10. Things you can do
Keyword search
http://api.lib.harvard.edu/v2/items?q=peanuts
Search scoped to specific fields
http://api.lib.harvard.edu/v2/items?title=peanuts
http://api.lib.harvard.edu/v2/items?title=peanuts&name=Schulz
Search with exact-match, wildcards, stemming.
http://api.lib.harvard.edu/v2/items?title_exact=Peanuts
http://api.lib.harvard.edu/v2/items?title=p*nut

11. More things you can do
Facets
http://api.lib.harvard.edu/v2/items.json?title=peanuts&facets=resourceType
http://api.lib.harvard.edu/v2/items.json?title=peanuts&facets=resourceType,
subject.name
Paging and sorting
http://api.lib.harvard.edu/v2/items.json?title=peanuts&sort.asc=resourceTyp
e
http://api.lib.harvard.edu/v2/items.json?title=peanuts&start=100&limit=50

12. Things you can’t do (yet)
● Retrieve data in Dublin Core format
● Search by date
● Retrieve metadata about collections of
items
● Create your own collections (tagging)
● Retrieve metadata about usage of items
● View non-open access records

13. What lies beneath
or, life beyond the API

14. LibraryCloud is more than the API
Metadata platform
Connect information flows underneath
Provide programmatic access on top
(this should be familiar)

15. Design goals
● Enable access to data for use cases that aren’t well
supported by an API
● Remove bottlenecks to implementing new features
● Supportable by Library Technology Services (LTS)
● Align with Harvard University IT technology strategy
● Extendable to new data sources (internal and external
to Harvard) and new applications

16. Logical Architecture

18. Sample Ingest Workflow

20. What does this get us?
Supportable technology stack: AWS (EC2,
SQS), Java services
Scalable ingest process
Well-defined interfaces throughout the ingest
process

21. What’s next
● More data sources (VIA, OASIS finding aids,
DASH, HGL, usage data etc.)
● Collections API (read/write)
● OAI-PMH endpoint

22. How you can help
Use the API. Let us know what should be
added, and what doesn’t work. Submit bug
reports. Build cool stuff.
Contact: librarycloud@hulmail.harvard.edu

23. Contact
LibraryCloud
librarycloud@hulmail.harvard.edu
Jeffrey Licht (Pod Consulting)
jeff@podconsulting.com
David Weinberger
self@evident.com

24. Questions?