The [BLT] Blog for Library Technology recently posted about some work in developing an easy to consume API with JSON output over the top of the Aleph Library System X-Server – excellent work documented at http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/blt/archives/2008/06/new_rest-ful_ap.html

Just as a very quick demo of what you can achieve once this type of API is available, here is a Yahoo Pipe that prompts for an author surname and record range, and returns titles as an RSS – hopefully easy to extend from here.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=3IvBX_Ez3RGCzxe6JZhxuA

I'd originally hoped to take the output as JSON and feed into a SIMILE Timeline but this proved beyond my abilities/brainat this time of the morning at least (if not at any time of day) – hopefully someone else will manage to do something on top of this…