My last post was about my recent talk where I try to highlight how iTunes is able to work its instant-sharing magic - by using ZeroConf. Today Walt Mossberg, the most influential tech writer around, chose to highlight this very thing in his must-read Personal Technology column called "You're Using iTunes, But Are You Missing Some of the Fun?"
So to paraphrase Mr. Mossberg:
"You're using the library and the network, but you're missing some of the fun."
Thanks to inkdroid I've been nursing a geek crush on ZeroConf for over a year. Its time might just be now.
(If, after reading the WSJ piece, you want to know more about ways ZeroConf could be used in libraries, just follow the tag. I just hope it grows more coherent as you move forward in time.)
DAAP for SLAPI?
I was amazed the first time I dragged a PDF file to iTunes and it consumed it. You can't share PDFs with iTunes like you can audio files, but I wonder if any of the generic DAAP applications, which have reverse-engineered Apple's protocol, can bypass that restriction. If so, and if you could map a representation of library content within the /databases/[num]/containers/[num]/items syntax of DAAP, the library could literally be in iTunes in a way.
That would be a neat trick
Hey Art - I've thought about doing something like that, but thought maybe photoshopping it would be easier. :) Now that the finder has a bit more of an iTunesish look with coverflow and all, it'd be interesting to just try it there.
Hmm... actually, since you've mapped the catalog to a webdav folder, maybe you *could* just browse it in the finder if you expose it to the network properly!
This all sounds like a great hackfest project.
Bibliographic management tools
I've been following your posts on ZeroConfOpenMetaSearch for a while, and I use Zotero regularly, but it wasn't until I read this review of some new-ish bibliographic management software that I realized this is already happening. There are dozens of apps in this space (they're being marketed as "iTunes for academic literature") and many will automatically pull down relevant papers from public sources, like PubMed. Read the comments - researchers are clamoring for access to subscription databases through these tools. How long until the vendors begin to partner with the software developers to do an end run around the whole library delivery model?
You're totally right that
You're totally right that this is already happening. Hopefully I've been bringing some people along to realize that there are some things we librarians can do to make things move more smoothly.
I don't know so much about the "end run" you suggest... not sure which "vendors" and "software developers" you mean. Just like there are some things software developers can do better than librarians these days, it's equally true that there are many things libraries are better suited for than software shops (so long as we stay true to those things). We've been through a few of these cycles before. The balance is shifting a lot now, sure, but, after a while, it'll probably shift back, unless we really blow it.
Anyway, thanks for the comment, and the link - I'd seen that writeup but hadn't remembered to try some of those apps for myself.
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