News & Noteworthy

LITA Offering Web Course on Mashups and APIs

Creating Library Web Services: Mashups and APIs will be held April 18-22, 2011 and presented by Karen Coombs of the OCLC Developer Network and Jason Clark of Montana State University Libraries. Live, synchronous lectures will be presented each day from 10:00 am – 12 noon CDT.

This five-day course will help participants learn how to bring pieces of the web together with library data: del.icio.us subject guides, Flickr library displays, YouTube library orientation. Learn what an API is and what it does, the components of web services, how to build a mashup, how to work with PHP, and how to create web services for your library. Participants should be comfortable with HTML markup and have an interest in learning about web scripting and programming. This hands-on course is synchronous with a daily lecture followed by a hands-on exercise. Instructors will be available for any questions during the exercises. By the end of this course, participants will be able to: understand and apply the major terms of web services; use simple web services like Yahoo Pipes to bring multiple sources of data together; build simple mashups with Javascript; build simple mashups with Server-side scripts (PHP). Register online.