Superpatron - Friends of the Library, for the net

MLibrary 2.0 Special Interest Group / Library Bloggers

if you are in Ann Arbor this may be of interest...

MLibrary 2.0 Special Interest Group:
"Library Bloggers"
12:00 PM-1:00 PM
Monday, September 15, 2008
100 Hatcher

The MLibrary 2.0 Special Interest Group brown bag lunch will be a panel discussion of library bloggers. Topics will include what people blog about, why they blog, how they blog, reactions from readers and colleagues, coming up with topics, and the ethics of blogging. All are welcome. The library extends a special invitation to SI students.

If you have a umich.edu account join the group ml2sig.

Harlan Hatcher Graduate Labyrinth

I present to you the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Labyrinth:

"No map devised by mortals can show you the way out of this library once you become lost."

Thanks to visiting library blogger Fabi for the tip.

How to renew all of your books from the command line

The Ann Arbor library makes it easy to renew your library books; it's one click once you've logged in.  I thought I'd make it zero clicks.  Here's how.

I'm on a Mac running Firefox, so I have two tools at my disposal: "curl", a command line tool for making web requests, and Firebug, a debugger for Firefox that gives you a ton of page information.  The v1.2 version of Firebug works with Firefox 3.0, so make sure your versions are in sync.  curl is stable and widely distributed on many systems (including MS-DOS and Amiga!) so that should be easy; there's a similar tool "wget" which should be a substitute.

With those two I was able to come up with this (edited very slightly so that it won't work for you):

#!/bin/sh
# renew all items
curl -b "PHPSESSID=b93f03330de3fe399e2e9659fc2c5898" \
  -d "itemsformsub=1&renewall_button=Renew+All+Items" \
   https://www.aadl.org/user/890

I'll decode this for you to replicate this yourself, or more to the point so I remember what the heck I did (and I can only imagine a handful of people who this is for, but just to bear with me in case one of them comes up with a better idea!)

The first -b argument takes a PHP session ID key, which is the cookie that the AADL site uses to authenticate you.  I dug that out of the page with Firebug, or you can find it without that under Tools / Page Info / Security / View Cookies.  The expiration date on that particular cookie was less than a month away, so this script will have to be fixed up periodically with a new auth key.

The second -d argument takes the form information to fill out.  In this case Firebug showed me the form on the page that I was looking to fill out, and once I had turned on "Net" debugging it gave me all of the fields I needed to send on the "post" tab of the POST transaction. 

The final argument is the page to post to, in this case my user id number on the site.

The command produces (prodigious) output, which I should next parse I suppose to tell me which books to read, which ones to find, and all that - all in good time.

The same approach (with all of the details changed, but the same tools) could work for you if your library system has a web based way to renew books.

Ann Arbor District Library is hiring / foreign language, ESL, language learning

as posted on MICHLIB-L

The Ann Arbor District Library (AADL) is accepting applications for a Librarian, job #08-353.

Applications postmarked or received at one of our locations by 9:00pm on Friday, July 25, 2008 will be eligible for consideration.

The job description is available at each of our locations and on our website http://www.aadl.org/aboutus/employment.

Hiring range: $41,743 - $54,163

Contractual position with medical, dental and vision insurance available; paid vacation and sick leave; retirement plan.

One of the notable pieces of the job description is:

Selects, catalogs, and maintains the foreign language collection, the English as a Second Language (ESL) collection and the language learning materials.

The HR contact is Jennifer Brown for any questions - I am not the hiring manager or anything, just an occasion user of the foreign language collection.

Traverwood Branch of the Ann Arbor District Library grand opening (preview, with waterfall)

Grand opening party tonight!

Here's Eric Klooster's preview video of what it looks like from the inside when it rains.

Ann Arbor District Library survey on parking and library improvements

Dear Library Patron,

One year ago, the Library conducted focus groups with over 100 persons
in our district to discuss the future of the Downtown Library. We
learned a great deal about what people love about the Downtown library
and what they feel can be improved. This year, the Library has hired
Luckenbach|Ziegleman Architects and Skanska to work with us to develop
two programs: one for a renovated and expanded Library and the other for
a new Downtown Library, both to be located at Fifth and William. At the
same time, the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority is moving
forward with a site plan to build a large underground parking structure
on the "library lot". The convergence of these two activities led us to
develop a joint survey asking for feedback on both the library and
parking.

Please take this opportunity to contribute to the important decisions
that will need to be made by the AADL, the City of Ann Arbor, and the
DDA.

You do not need to be a library user or a resident of Ann Arbor to fill
out the survey, which can be found here:

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/survey-intro.zgi?p=WEB227QYHKFE6J

All feedback is appreciated.

In addition, you are invited to attend any of the following Public
Meetings at the Downtown Library to review our work and add your
thoughts to the discussion:

Monday, June 2nd 7:00 - 9pm
Wednesday, June 4th 10:00 - noon
Sunday, June 8th 3:00 - 5 pm

Thank you very much for your time, and thanks for using the library!

Josie Parker
Director, Ann Arbor District Library

twitter at your library - what should or could it do?

Ryan Eby just invited me to join the Ann Arbor District Library twitter feed:

http://twitter.com/aadl

He promises event notifications and other newsworthy stuff.

Once upon a time I built a "superpatronbot" that searched the AADL catalog via a Jabber bot - quite reasonably you could build one of these upon Twitter's direct message listings. Useful? Perhaps, especially if I could link a Twitter account to my library card and then be able to twitter

d aadl reserve anatomy of a murder dvd

and have it do a hold on it for me (or return some disambiguator if there were multiple choices).

(Reminder - Library Camp 2008 at the AADL, March 20 2008.)

Technorati Tags: aadl, twitter

Ann Arbor District Library elections, May 6, 2008

The election for the upcoming Ann Arbor District Library board has the following candidates. Note that there is one candidate for one two-year position, and four candidates for four four-year positions; that is, these positions are uncontested.

Original from the site of the Washtenaw County Clerk and Register of Deeds - that page has email addresses and phone numbers listed, and I'm copying them in here too. The candidate links are all to Arborwiki, which will in the due course of time fill in details.

Ann Arbor District Library - Trustee

One 2-Year Term
Name Address Phone E-mail
Edward Surovell 1000 Forest Road
Ann Arbor, MI 48105 734-761-6330 esurovell@aol.com

Four 4-Year Terms
Name Address Phone E-mail
Rebecca Head 910 Edgewood Place
Ann Arbor, MI 48103 734-668-9638 r_head@sbcglobal.net
Jean Ledwith King 424 Little Lake Dr., #38
Ann Arbor, MI 48103 734-662-4819 jking@ic.net
Margaret A. Leary 1056 Newport Rd.
Ann Arbor, MI 48103 734-663-7324 mleary@umich.edu
Prue Rosenthal 2105 Devonshire Rd.
Ann Arbor, MI 48104 734-665-0941 pruer@aol.com

Vote early, vote often.

Technorati Tags: library, trustee, election, annarbor, aadl, vote

Library Camp 2008 at Ann Arbor District Library, March 20 2008

I met with Eli and the team at the AADL about the 2008 Library Camp to be held March 20 in Ann Arbor. (NOTE THE DATE - GOT IT WRONG THE FIRST TIME).

Continuing the tradition from 2006, there are some small amounts of conflicts with religious holidays - March 20 is Maundy Thursday, it's the Thursday before Easter and the Friday before Purim. I'm hoping that won't cause undue hardship for people who have break around that time, but with all of the other travel and new branch schedules that's what worked out.

The 2006 Library Camp had people coming mostly from within about 100 miles; given normal travel and time budgets I'm hoping we'll get a slightly wider draw, at least enough to make sure that someone can come from the Chicago area, someone makes it in from Indiana and Ohio and Ontario, and the odd person who might go further afield.

A history of other library camps (or similar) that have been done before:
- February 2006 - code4lib 2006, Corvallis OR
- April 2006 - Library Camp in Ann Arbor, MI
- September 2006 - Library Camp East in Darien, CT
- February 2007 - code4lib 2007, Athens GA
- March 2007 - L2 Unconference, Australia
- August 2007 - Library Camp NYC, Baruch College
- August 2007 - Library2.0 on the Loose, Australia
- February 2008 - code4lib 2008, Portland OR
- March 2008 - Library Camp 2008 in Ann Arbor, MI

There is of course a checklist of things to do, links to add, a wiki to find or co-opt for our purposes, local arrangements to arrange, assembling the right mix of librarians and non-librarians to make the day interesting etc.

We have space for about 100 people, up from the 40 or so that squeezed into the first Library Camp.

More details as they appear, looking forward to seeing you there!

Comcast blocking Ann Arbor District Library email

UPDATE: Email problem (aka "comcastrophy") fixed now.

Submitted by eli on Thu, 11/29/2007 - 10:59am.
Attention Comcast Customers: AADL Emails Blocked!

Hello Comcast Email Subscribers! On Wenesday, 11/28, Comcast decided that AADL was spamming their customers and began blocking our emails. We have already applied to be removed from the blocked senders list, but in the meantime, comcast.net addresses cannot receive email from AADL. This means that you may miss a notice that a request is ready to be picked up, or a reminder that an item is due or overdue. Please check your myaccount page to view the current status of your account until we get this resolved. We hope to hear back from Comcast today, and we will keep you posted right here as we continue to work on the problem.

Thanks for your patience, and as always, please contactus or comment on this post if you have any questions.

eli

Technorati Tags: aadl, comcast