Lee Dirks just created a "Scholarly Communications" group on Facebook. Most of my work while I was in Microsoft Research was associated/supported by Lee's group. Lee and Alex Wade are doing an amazing job. They have so many ideas on how technologies could support the work of scholars and they are delivering tools/services on so many fronts. It's soooo cool to see that they are using social media to reach out to the community.

Furthermore, it's fantastic to be with them today at the OCLC Mashathon event at the University of Washington. They asked me to join them for the day so we could do some fun prototyping around OCLC's recently announced APIs. It's fun to work with Alex. He's coming up with cool scenarios, does some investigation on the available functionality out there, and then explains them to me so I can build the prototype. We've already built a first cool demo for integrating OCLC's search API and other services with Windows 7. Now we are working on a Silverlight-based mashup with Bing maps.

Our first prototype allows a scholar to search for any library library straight from within Windows 7's interface. We built a small service that mashes up other services in order to enable a search experience through Open Search, which is supported natively by Windows 7.

Screenshot from Alex's laptop

 
Group photo and the Microsoft delegation: Alex, Savas, Lee 🙂