Library Social Widgets Toolkit – Interview: Shiraz Azizali

Sep 4, 2009 by devcsi-team

Shiraz Azizali from LSE talks about the Library Social Widgets ToolkitA useful tool for students and librariansWhat is the Library Social Widgets Toolkit?It allows students to login to the social network of their choice (like facebook), add our widget and immediately see what items they’ve got on loan from libraries, renew books online – and get information on what they’re meant to be studying that week.What problems/issues is it tackling?There isn’t a clean way to transmit information about what people have on loan. We’re filling a middleware void.How would you like other software developers and users to get involved in what you are doing?It’s a useful toolkit that could be used with other library systems and other institutions. This event has been useful because I’ve hooked up with someone from the OU and we’ve had a go at hacking something together already.What developer communities have you been involved in and if none, why not?There’s a community around the technology I’m using: The Grails community. There’s a big community at the LSE. There are various Open Source events around London (usually at Skills Matters) that have been useful.What is the coolest or most exciting thing in educational software development?Someone made a pitch yesterday on newspapers and comparing the portrayal of scientific knowledge in the media with the actual papers that portrayal is supposedly based on… and spotting the discrepancies!