I decided to start my presentation today in the time honored tradition of the storyteller – “Once upon a time I worked at a small but dynamic bookstore in the 80's and 90's – What is equal to lightyears ago in the digital age. (# next slide)
and Yes I have become one of those people who say “What is equal to lightyears ago in the digital age.” I’ll likely be throwing in “this is what my kids tell me they use” next as grounds for thinking I understand the youth of today. (kik –android app closing etc)(#next slide)
At any rate - our small team of booksellers found ourselves constantly involved in little projects like computerizing our inventory, creating our own POS system, adding a cinema and a bar and so on -but one of the biggest projects we ever undertook (#next slide)
was to build an ecommerce solution.(#next slide)
It seemed innocent enough at the time but, as many of you know the unknowns about the online retail space way back in that distant galaxy ……(#next slide)
were massive, the efforts involved ……(#next slide)
herculean, the frustrations …... (#next slide)
More meandering then the Amazon. (#next slide)
Today's Halcyon days of ecommerce are not without their minor tempests – some of which involve the inconsistencies that appear in product dataall over the global world that is the internet.(#next slide)
We present biblioshare - The birth and nurturing of BiblioShare is not unlike the early days of building ecommerce solutions. The Standardsoften lag behind the innovation we are seeing, the implementation of new standardsmoves as fast as a receding glacier or like climate change ignored altogether. However, .(#next slide)
our work in the minefields of ONIX ingestion and storage, image storage and position file data, in order to provide book metadata to the Canadian market and perhaps the world has not been without its small victories. Today BiblioShare is becoming a more and more mature service providing APIs that allow frictionless ways of getting at standardized data and, in a lot of cases -all for free!(#next slide)
We do custom work (!explain)(#next slide)
So what is BiblioShare? BiblioShare is a dream. It is a dream that one day all books will be judged according to the content between their covers and not because they could not be uncovered online due to bad metadata. BiblioShare wants your book to be discovered online and easily accessible. (#next slide)
And we are beginning this great dream with our own: In House Solutions(#Next)
The much loved digital catalogue product CataList
We hope to continue to integrate more bibliographic data from BISH into Salesdata
The much maligned and oft misunderstood prospector - a tool for retailers to do Gap analysis – incorporates the service for position file information
Collaborative efforts like
Gives us their data and then uses our APIs to access it in some of their solutions
And then coming full circle we hope that booksellers will find with all of the versatile, affordable and natively digital tools available they can remove the boulder from their shoulders, find their way out of the labyrinthe, avoid crashing on the sirens coast that
Product placement in your blog
Work in progress
As we continue to tinker with this wealth of data we hope others will to. Currently we are tinkering in the terrifying world of ONIX to MARC mapping. We are also building widgets that we think the industry will find useful. If you would like to play it is simple. Get a token, read the documentation and play away. We can all be in this together.