Vancouver's Open Data, Open Standards, Open Source and the Vancouver Public Library

Vancouver has adopted a policy of Open Data, Open Standards, Open Source and I'm really excited about it. David Ascher presented on the topic at Open Web Vancouver 2009 and pointed out that if we don't engage the city and use this data it will go nowhere.

The Vancouver Public Library is one of my favourite places. I love libraries, I love books, but the library here in Vancouver is a really special library for me. So I've been thinking of ways that the library could share data so that I could build applications to make the library more interesting and more valuable to the people of the city.

Here's some data I'd like to have:

• Books on order

  I'd like to know what new books are currently on order, but not available. I want a preview of coming attractions.

• Most unpopular books

  What doesn't get checked out? What's likely to get sold in the next round of disposal, ahem, book sale?

• Most popular books

  What's everybody reading?

• Top 100 sites for library patrons

  What are the most popular sites browsed from the library? I'd like to be able to contrast this with the most popular sites according to Alexa. That should help tell the library what sorts of services patrons need.

These are things that I could mash up into interesting applications, such as presenting a unified view of new popular books on Amazon and which ones are in the library, or popular in the local community.