Superpatron

Library goings on in Northfield, MN

The Northfield, MN public library expansion project is featured in a podcast from Northfield Online produced by my friend Griff Wigley. How many chances does your library have to get their director on the radio for 20+ minutes? Worth a listen.

Northfield Online also publishes library board meeting minutes and a host of other locally produced, locally written citizen journalism. It's a model for what a town's online media might be if it's not written by the local newspaper. (For one thing, the citizen journalism site does not have blinking ads...)

Technorati Tags: library, northfield, minnesota

Inter-library limbo

Consider this situation -

Your library has a copy of a book in its catalog, but that copy was checked out long ago. It's marked as "overdue", but still in the collection.

You want to look at the book, so you place a hold on the book for when it comes in. You wait and wait, nothing. So you are persistent and ask to have the book by inter-library loan, and then discover that you can't ILL the book because your library has it already. Your book is in inter-library limbo.

A solution: libraries should be running reports regularly on books that their patrons have had on hold for a long time to see what's up with them, and they should be more aggressive about marking long-overdue books as "missing" to help the next person in line. And library software vendors should make this process easy and routine and not some horrible manual hours long process to figure out.

(This didn't happen to me, but I overheard it when sitting near a reference desk one day.)

Technorati Tags: library, ILL

the stray bookmarks of previous patrons

I was talking to a friend at a coffee shop the other day about libraries, and he remarked that books sometimes go through the Ann Arbor District Library so fast that they don't get thoroughly checked for bookmarks left by previous patrons. He's seen airline ticket stubs, note cards, and even a checkout slip that I accidentally left in a book.

I'd love it if every time I got a book there was some leftover of a previous reader - a few notes on a card telling me where the good pages are, or a bookmark at a particular fine illustration.

Here's a page of bookmarks from the Christchurch City Libraries in New Zealand. And here's to bookmarks that have a bit of blank space for patrons on them to take notes!

Eli Neiburger's blog ulo.tricho.us

http://ulo.tricho.us/ is Eli Neiburger's blog. Eli is Tech Manager at the Ann Arbor District Library and he writes

This is a blog vaguely focused on Libraries, Videogames, Videogames in Libraries, Libraries in Videogames, Videogame Libraries, and Library Videogames. And futuring. And futura. And Futurama. And Information Technology. And other geekery. And kids too, probably a little, let’s be honest.

There's a big chunk of video game literacy I am missing. The Pong, Wizardry, Ms. Pac-Man, Pengo, and nethack eras are well covered, but lots of modern stuff isn't. I count on Eli to write about games I've never heard of so that I can be ready when my kids are ready to play video games of their own.

Wall of books update: new and hot books at the AADL

I updated the "wall of books" pages with new and hot books at the Ann Arbor District Library. Each page displays 100 book covers with recent acquisitions and with books that have a lot of holds.

The most holds at the AADL right now are "The World is Flat" with 123 holds on 51 copies and Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking" with 117 holds on 48 copies. New on the list is Ali Smith's "The Accidental" with 62 holds on only 4 copies, with 4 more in process.

New non-fiction that caught my eye includes The Undercover Economist, D. J. Taylor's new biography of Orwell, and a guidebook to Bruges.

I'm starting to think about what it would take to make the display a little more meaningful than just book covers, while still maintaining that level of information density that a wall of books displays. I think that a little glyph that indicated if the book was available and if not how many holds there were on it would be a good start, or perhaps using the color of the border of the image as a marker.

It's still pretty rough, but this go-around took a lot less time than the first time I did it, and I'm just about ready to believe I can update these daily without any undue problems. The latest version of the AADL REST interface that John Blyberg is working on has easy links to cover images of books, so this starts to get simpler all the time.

Connecting online bookstores to the library catalog

Superpatron Jon Udell has an idea for a service that connects a patron's Amazon's wishlist to a library catalog's holdings, so that when you put a book on your wishlist at Amazon it shows up in a feed in your news reader when the book comes in at the library. There's code in Python that does all the work.

Also of note is John Blyberg's latest REST interface to the AADL catalog. It's changed a little since I last wrote some code against it, and it's clearly mutating daily until things shake out, but it promises to make it really easy to have a service like "put this book on my Amazon wishlist, and when it comes in at the library put a hold on it". Of course then you have to actually find time to read all these books...

Technorati Tags: annarbor, library2.0, udell, jonudell, infoworld, amazon

Games in the children's room of your library

What games can your kids play when they are in the children's room of the library?

At Ann Arbor, there's a checkers set with nice big (3 inch) checkers at kid height. I taught Saul the rudiments of the game - he was very excited about "king me!" and that got him thinking about what he could do to play better.

One of the Memphis public library branches has a Saturday Afternoon Fun tournament 2x/mo with games like mancala and bingo for the kids. At the Lexington Public Library you can get together and make a mancala game.

Not for playing but for study: the John G. White Chess and Checkers Collection at the Cleveland Public Library has 32,000 books and magazines on the topic.

Sample card catalog output using XSLT and CSS from the AADL catalog

Tonight was as good a night as any to learn a little bit, and so I reinvented John Blyberg's virtual catalog card using XSLT and CSS. It's very rough right now, but the results are good enough to show.

The URL that shows everything is this uber-long monstrosity:

http://www.w3.org/2000/06/webdata/xslt?xslfile=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.superpatron.com%2Faadlexample.xsl&xmlfile=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aadl.org%2Fcat%2Frest%2Frecord%2F1249810&transform=Submit

Go ahead, click, it won't bite. See?

In real life you would not use that - in real life the XML from the catalog would have a style sheet with it of some kind. But just to play along, here's how you parse that.

The first bit from w3.org is the public xslt translator they run. Be gentle, and don't expect it to be a production service.

The second part is the XSL file, http://www.superpatron.com/aadlexample.xsl . It's a programming language written in XML that takes an XML file and turns it into anything, very typically another XML (or HTML) file. Your web browser has that programming language built into it. If you look at the page it's not actually all that complicated - you're essentially grabbing elements from one page and plunking them into a template. I'm at about the edge of my knowledge with this file right now, but it does work....

This xsl file in turn includes a CSS file, http://www.superpatron.com/aadlexample.css . The CSS is a style sheet that makes the page look pretty - it selects things like fonts, background images, spacing, and other layout elements for a page. The CSS here is very minimal. You'll see that it includes a background image from John's card catalog collection on Flickr.

Finally, there's an XML file, http://www.aadl.org/cat/rest/record/1249810 , which has the raw catalog information from the AADL's site. It is marked up in such a way that all of the fields in it are readily accessable. (The only thing I noticed missing from it was subject headings.) The XML could, if it wanted to, specify an external XSL file to be interpreted by the browser.

String all of this stuff together, and you get this:

but this is now data, not just an image, and you could (though i stopped before I did) have some of the elements be live links.

Technorati Tags: css, xslt, xsl, annarbor, library, cardcatalog, library2.0

Libraries 411, library locator service

Check out Libraries411, a US directory of where libraries are that has Google or Yahoo maps of locations. Find that branch you have been meaning to check out, or plan your vacation with stops at libraries with good children's rooms as rest stops.

Thanks to Nancy White for the pointer.

Technorati Tags: maps

write on your card catalog

John Blyberg writes about a neat hack he did to let you write on cards in the card catalog. I've been a fan of marginalia for a long time, this is one start at it.

This seems to be part of a trend of patron-contributed metadata, but more importantly, it's just cool to grab some old ideas about how people organize their information about books and make them new again.

Technorati Tags: cardcatalog, libraryhacks, marginalia