If you like playing around with bibliographic and other library data (and let’s face it, who doesn’t?) then you are in for a good summer.

Two events to get into your diary now are the WorldCat Mashathon in Amsterdam on 13/14 May, and Mash Oop North (tag is mashlib09) in Huddersfield, UK, on 7th July.

The Worldcat Mashathon is an event organised by OCLC which promises access to data derived from the 1.2 billion records in Worldcat via a variety of web services. This event follows on from the previous Worldcat Hackathon held in New York City last year – to get a flavour of the event you can see a video summary on the Hackathon on YouTube. The OCLC Developer Network wiki has further details and registration.

Mash Oop North is the 2009 incarnation of Mashed Libraries UK. As the organiser of the previous mashlib08 event I can’t really comment on exactly how excellent it was, but Mash Oop North is being organised by Dave Pattern and others, so I can objectively say it is bound to be a brilliant event. To see the kind of thing that happened at mashlib08, and to keep up to date with new of Mash Oop North, keep an eye on http://mashedlibrary.ning.com. Mash Oop North is being sponsored by Talis, although if you are interested in supporting the event, you may want to consider donating a prize (if you aren’t sure what prize to offer, may I suggest a speedboat?)

[For a guide to the cultural references in this post, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullseye_(UK_game_show)]