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Google Wave and Igor

For the BIGWIG Showcase this year, I talked about and put together a presentation on Google Wave, and what I think it will do to library services. One of the things I talked about was the ability for software robots to watch the Wave, and alter it in specific ways. Well, it looks like we’ve got our first bibliographic example of this, with Igor. Stew over at Flags & Lollipops has put together a robot that will watch a given Wave for mentions of citations, and then query and automagically fill in footnotes from PubMed, Connotea, or CiteULike (for now, I’m sure that Zotero and other coverage is easily possible).

I’ve got no idea how he did this, given that Wave isn’t public yet…but the demo shows what’s going to be possible with Wave. Take a look, and get ready….Wave might change everything. You may need to click through and enlarge the player to really see what’s going on.

Igor – a Google Wave robot to manage your references from Stew Fnl on Vimeo.

Igor is a robot for Google Wave written in Java and running on Google App Engine.

It allows users to pull in references from PubMed & personal libraries on Connotea or CiteULike by querying services with keywords that they supply inline with the article you’re writing.

By griffey

Jason Griffey is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he works to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise is useful and needed. Prior to joining NISO in 2019, Jason ran his own technology consulting company for libraries, has been both an Affiliate at metaLAB and a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and was an academic librarian in roles ranging from reference and instruction to Head of IT at the University of TN at Chattanooga.

Jason has written extensively on technology and libraries, including multiple books and a series of full-periodical issues on technology topics, most recently AI & Machine Learning in Libraries and Library Spaces and Smart Buildings: Technology, Metrics, and Iterative Design from 2018. His newest book, co-authored with Jeffery Pomerantz, will be published by MIT Press in 2024.

He has spoken internationally on topics such as artificial intelligence & machine learning, the future of technology and libraries, decentralization and the Blockchain, privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. A full list of his publications and presentations can be found on his CV.
He is one of eight winners of the Knight Foundation News Challenge for Libraries for the Measure the Future project (http://measurethefuture.net), an open hardware project designed to provide actionable use metrics for library spaces. He is also the creator and director of The LibraryBox Project (http://librarybox.us), an open source portable digital file distribution system.

Jason can be stalked obsessively online, and spends his free time with his daughter Eliza, reading, obsessing over gadgets, and preparing for the inevitable zombie uprising.

3 replies on “Google Wave and Igor”

Thanks for spotlighting that video. Makes me wonder why the traditional citation management software vendors (EndNote, RefWorks, et al) didn’t develop their own write-and-cite plugin for Word that offered this kind of “search your own collection and autoformat the cite” functionality. I can’t wait to get my hands on Google Wave to figure out how we can use it for reference services.

The code for Igor has been posted at http://code.google.com/p/helpmeigor/

There have been some interesting discussions going on over at http://groups.google.com/group/knowledge-waves, though things have been a bit quite in the past few days.

I’d like to make two comments;

Getting the kind of coverage for doing all of the citation wrangling, extraction and conversion that users need would best be accomplished though collaborative contributions to code, such as through extending Igor. I’m not sure that this is easy. If there is expertise within the library community it would be great to see code flowing.

I’m excited to hear that there is an interest from within the library community about Wave. I work for Nature Publishing Group’s Web Publishing division, and the initial feedback that we have been getting from scientists is one of “Meh”. There is a long way to go before value from Wave can be demonstrated.

The code for Igor has been posted at http://code.google.com/p/helpmeigor/There have been some interesting discussions going on over at http://groups.google.com/group/knowledge-waves, though things have been a bit quite in the past few days.I'd like to make two comments; Getting the kind of coverage for doing all of the citation wrangling, extraction and conversion that users need would best be accomplished though collaborative contributions to code, such as through extending Igor. I'm not sure that this is easy. If there is expertise within the library community it would be great to see code flowing. I'm excited to hear that there is an interest from within the library community about Wave. I work for Nature Publishing Group's Web Publishing division, and the initial feedback that we have been getting from scientists is one of “Meh”. There is a long way to go before value from Wave can be demonstrated.

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