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a compilation of chapters by 25 librarians around the world who have used mashups within their organisations to improve services to their patrons. Each chapter includes first-hand experiences and tips for using outside data sources to enhance library offerings.

"Web Search engines most often operate on the idea that their tools are supposed to represent the fastest way between a user's search query and a site that will represent a fitting information content to satisfy a "information need". The main challenge is therefore about building ranking algorithms that will find the "best" site and put it into first place. While this approach has been highly successful it also neglects the user's ability to interact, select, navigate, analyze - in short, to be an active agent and a stakeholder in the search process. Our proposal is the technical manifestation of a simple concept: instead of reducing the search phase to a minimum we believe that there is much to be gained by presenting a semantically rich interface to users; this interface can be used to either navigate in a list of results (1000 in the case of our current prototype) or to refine the search query. The "termcloud" and "cluster" views give a quick overview of a topic by showing which terms are significant, their relative frequency and the relations that exist between them. This way the user gets an idea of the topic before even visiting a Web site from the result list. We hope that this approach will help users in digging deeper than the first couple of results and explore the regions of the Web that might not be so easy to find with a regular, hit-driven search engine."

"A simple componentised framework constructed in Javascript to enable the sharing of Ajax Style extensions to a web interface. Although the drive for this is rooted in Library OPAC interfaces, the framework is applicable to any environment which, via identifiers contained within a html page, needs to link to or embed external resources. "