John Miedema

FuzzyCat connects books on the web to books in libraries.
FuzzyCat is an open source project that will work nicely with OpenBook, but can also be used or modified to suit the needs of others. Open book projects are becoming increasingly important. In my previous post, I referred to the OCLC licensing issue, but the problem is much bigger. OpenBook was motivated by aggressive commercial moves by Amazon that adversely affect independent writers and publishers. On Monday, Publishers Weekly reported that Amazon notified its publisher and author clients that it …

I first stumbled on OCLC earlier this decade and read about WorldCat. I was not in the library field, but I was an avid reader. The WorldCat project was not live at the time, but it promised to make the world’s libraries searchable by anyone from a single point. What a great idea!
I did some research at the Internet Archive, and found that in April 2006, the domain of worldcat.org displayed only a “FirstSearch” logon; it was not live yet. By August 2006, it was live.
Unfortunately, as of January …

FuzzyCat (0.4 alpha) is available for experimentation by anyone and for download by techies.
By now you know that FuzzyCat connects readers on the web to books in libraries. So does WorldCat, but FuzzyCat works in a completely different way, allowing for discovery of libraries not in WorldCat.
Here’s how WorldCat works. It is not open source so I cannot speak with authority or detail on this, but I have a pretty good idea. WorldCat has a database of book records. Each book has a bit of hidden bibliographic data called COinS, …

I have an emerging mental image of FuzzyCat as a street-smart cat, not well-heeled at all, but rather a lean critter, adept at travelling both the high roads and low roads of the web, yet still the kind of cat you’d like to pull out of the rain, give a plate of milk, and curl up on your lap near the fire, warm and fuzzy.
In my previous post in the FuzzyCat series, I revealed the FuzzyCat secret, the shortcut it uses to search libraries for books so that most libraries …

FuzzyCat has reached an early milestone. Version 0.5 (alpha) demonstrates that FuzzyCat can crawl at least ten distinct library catalogue (OPAC) models from multiple vendors, as shown at fourteen library websites.
FuzzyCat is an OPAC crawler. It is intended as a way of searching a specified library catalogue for the availability of a particular book. With FuzzyCat, the library’s catalogue is available like a web service. It can be called from any web page. For example, if I use FuzzyCat with OpenBook, a reader could be reading a book review …

In a burst of inspiration some months ago, I created FuzzyCat, a prototype crawler of library OPACs. A crawler has the ability to search library catalogues and make its content available on the web. It has been said that library catalogues are not amenable to crawling, but an early FuzzyCat prototype demonstrated that it could crawl 10 distinct vendor catalogues used by hundreds of libraries. I hit a wall as I attempted to include catalogues that made more extensive use of javascript, especially for page redirects. The problem is solvable …