1000+ library cards and counting…

Posted on by jessamyn

Michael Sauers eat your heart out. I wonder if this kid has the best online database access in the world?

Welcome to the official site of the Great Library Card Collection. My name is Cory Peterson and I am the proud owner of this collection. I am 13 years old and I live in Suisun City, California. At this website, you may view scans of my library cards from around the world. Currently, I have over 1,000 library cards. [vtlibraries listserv]

hi – 28nov

Posted on by jessamyn

Hi. I went to the Somerville Public Library on Buy Nothing Day (this past Friday) and it was closed up tight. As I sat outside enjoying the sunshine, I must have seen fifteen people go up to the front door and try to open it. I understand why the library is closed on Thanksgiving, I would have been concerned if it hadn’t been. But, except as an extreme cost-cutting maneuver, being closed the day after Thanksgiving seems to be a bad customer service move. People are home from work, kids are home from school. Everyone is out and about. Balancing a happy staff with a happy patron base I’m sure is always a challenge, but I was still sad to not be able to go to the library on Friday. More on my holiday weekends, my haircut, and some digitial divide hurdling on my personal site.

my tag cloud and forcing an opac solution

Posted on 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.

  1. Open, read-only, direct access to the database
  2. A full-blown, W3C standards-based API to all read-write functions
  3. The option to run the ILS on hardware of our choosing, on servers that we administer
  4. 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?