So just under a week on from our big release of Denver Public Library catalog pages on the Web (in the form of Linked Data), progress is quite exciting. The Google bot is working methodically through the 3.7 million Web pages, with about 300 thousand indexed so far. The Bing bot is lagging behind a fair bit, but Google's Comscore ranking for search usage makes it our realistic priority now. A DPL Libhub page is already the #1 Google hit for the following sample searches (note, all sample searches done in an incognito window to step outside my personal Google filter bubble).
- "The wonderful wizard of Oz a community-sourced audiobook"
- "精明人买精彩车" (book about cars)
- "지은이구효서외" (book of Korean short stories)
- "National Jewish Hospital at Denver Annual medical report" (historical report)
- "National compensation survey. Denver-Boulder-Greeley" (BLS policy report)
- "Dem the best of Quang Dung" (Vietnamese music video/DVD)
And now that DPL has taught me about this particular Vietnamese musician, Here's a Quang Dung music break. Nice in a Latin/Lounge way.
A DPL Libhub page is somewhere on the front page for the following sample searches.
- "The Things That Matter women's poetry" (anthology of women's spiritual poetry)
- "Jing ming ren mai jing cai che" (note: same as #2 in the first list)
- "The poetry and life of Allen Ginsberg" (book-length narrative poem)
- "Coach John and his soccer team Alice Flanagan" (kid's book)
- "Soulz of the rockies documentary" (DVD)
- "The little green math book" (eBook)
As an engineer, I hate hearing stuff from people such as "I've never used algebra since grade school." Goodreads says this last book can help the innumerate fall in love with maths, so I hope a few people discover it at their local library, and actually, since it's an eBook, you can get it from DPL without even walking to the library, as long as you qualify to get a DPL library card, of course. If you live elsewhere, same applies to your local public library.
Of course none of these examples are very mainstream, but one wouldn't expect that so soon, and possibly not for a long while. However, libraries are most valuable as a resource for just such uncommon things, and you could imagine special interest and research needs leading people through Libhub to DPL, and into the habit of using their library. If we can succeed in that we'll have succeeded to our utter delight.
Update: Rachel Fewell, who has been leading this project from the DPL side, has also blogged some interesting findings and progress.