‘puters

librarians do and do not need to be coders.

When I said “librarians need to be coders” I mostly meant that they need to involve themselves in their technology. Science Library Pad has gone further and explicated this idea with a fancy diagram and some smart talk. Go read librarians 2.0 don’t need to be coders 2.0

Don’t try to build big complex systems. Live in the beta world. Get some chunk of functionality out quickly so that people can play with it. The hardest part is having the initial idea, and the good news is I see lots of great ideas out in the library blogosphere. I can understand the frustrations in the gap between the idea and running code, but I hope I’ve presented a bunch of areas above in which you can work to turn the idea into the next hot beta, without necessarily needing to code it yourself.

The systems world is not just buy/build. It’s buy, build, transform, collaborate, extend, transform, inspire, lead…

my tag cloud and forcing an opac solution

Posted on 23Nov0523Nov05 by jessamyn

Jason Griffey makes a good point, the “tag cloud” I referred to when talking about daveyp’s OPAC subject cloud was a bit of a misnomer. Now that I’m using LibraryThing, at least a little bit, I have been looking at my author cloud which makes me think one thing “Man I read on the plane a lot!”

I’ve been swapping email with Tim over at LibraryThing because I’ve been talking to some small libraries (less than 10,000 volumes) about OPAC ideas. LibraryThing doesn’t have an enterprise version yet, but it’s got some features I’d love to see in my own OPAC, like a feed for “recently added” books, options for turning book cover display on or off (why is this so hard?) and all the cloudy goodness. The small-library OPACs I’ve seen are often either kludgey stripped-down versions of larger ILSes, or they’ve got terrible web implementation which seems added on as an afterthought. If anyone has seen a stand-alone OPAC that’s attractive, cheap and easy for non-techies to implement, please let me know. We don’t need patron or money management features, just the book parts, and maybe a “checked in/out” flag.

While you’ve got your OPAC hat on, read the ILS Customer Bill of Rights and the four fundamental must-haves.

Open, read-only, direct access to the database
A full-blown, W3C standards-based API to all read-write functions
The option to run the ILS on hardware of our choosing, on servers that we administer
High security standards

Is that too much to ask? Don’t miss the comments, I’m going to make “glommed-together, katamariesque nightmare ILS codebase ” part of my lexicon. What’s katamari, you ask?

how do patrons perceive your filtering system?

Posted on 23Nov05 by jessamyn

Filtering is a reality that many libraries have to deal with in order to get funding for their connectivity and/or technology. I think some libraries give up once they have to filter and don’t make the patrons’ filtering interactions as user-friendly as their other library interactions.

librarians, technologists and free culture

Posted on 14Nov0515Nov05 by jessamyn

A great LJ post by Ben Ostrowsky about librarians and technology and another long list of things that we should know more about. Special appearance in the comments by Ben’s Mom!

I can invent a barcode generator that prints PDFs for cheap Avery labels, but it’s the users like you who tell school librarians that it’s a great way to save money (especially if you cover your labels with library tape anyway).

I can write an article on anonymous library cards and share it freely with a Creative Commons license, but it’s up to you to share the ideas with others and implement it yourselves….

At the risk of stealing material from Christ, I encourage you to go and do the same. If you don’t have a blog, get one and get comfortable with it. Join a mailing list and ask questions. If you see a question you can answer, do it. It is so not about me. It’s about you.