An introduction to mashups for health librarians

Short Description
This paper discusses mashups, medical mashups for health librarians, specifically. Mashups bring together two or more Web applications to produce a completely new infor- mation service. Put another way, a mashup is a hybrid that takes two information sources and merges them to create a third, more useful tool. A good example of a widely used mashup is Google Maps (http://www.google.com/apis/ maps), which combines Google Earth data with telephone directory information to create a useful satellite road map.

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Content
Although they are part of Web 2.0 and share Web 2.0’s openness, participation, and collaborative aspects, mashups build on a technological base dating back to the earliest days of the Web. By utilizing publicly available and open source code, mashups draw on current awareness tools like Web feeds, really simple syndication (RSS) or Atom, and JavaScript. While still experimental, mashups are worthy of close examination by health librarians interested in exploring new, creative methods of information delivery.
What is Web 2.0?
To understand mashups as a feature of Web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly’s definition [1] may serve as a useful starting point for our discussion: Web 2.0 is the [Web] as platform, spanning all connected devices;
Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: deliver- ing software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation”, and going be- yond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.
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