Thursday, January 17, 2013

(Deliberately not using a Field of Dreams reference to title this post.)

So Cen Campbell of Little eLit and I were playing on Facebook professionally networking, and the subject of BWI's recent demise came up. Now, every children's librarian I know pretty much loved BWI, particularly their TitleTales ordering tool. Cen and friends were wondering if it would be coming back, and I said I didn't think so. Boo.

"Alrighty then," said Cen. "We need to build something to replace it, only awesomer."

"I'm all over that," I replied. "You know what would be great? A children's book search engine that included all the review sources, plus tags, blog reviews, and user reviews. Like some kind of Goodreads + TitleTales genetic hybrid monster."

(Except it wouldn't include all of that weird YA author drama that lurks in the dark crevasses of Goodreads. It should include apps, though.)

Seriously, this needs to happen. I am not a software developer or database engineer, or I'd start working on it right now (plus - fingers crossed - I may be real busy with committee work next year). 

Another challenge: something like this should be free, I think, and I know that review content isn't cheap. Somebody has to keep Roger Sutton in bow ties, right? 

2 comments:

  1. A moment of silence for BWI...we certainly miss it here! We transitioned to B&T and have pretty much the same review content available, but don't find it quite as user-friendly. I like your idea, but only if it also allows you to place orders directly from there - if not, then I still have to duplicate my searches elsewhere to create an order. So it would have to also SELL books.

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    1. Well, count me out again then! To paraphrase Charlotte's Web, I lack a warehouse, and I lack know-how.

      I wonder if such a site could feature some kind of API to enable automatic adding to jobbers' carts, though.

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