Superpatron

U of Michigan Libraries to use Drupal for development

The University of Michigan Library just decided to use Drupal as their new content management system. You can find a list of content management systems that they evaluated at the Blog for Library Technology site.

An interesting consideration included this:

And in the end, we selected Drupal. While the other two tools had strengths, we ended up deciding against Joomla! because of what we perceived as a surfeit of security problems over time with frequent releases to patch bugs or security holes. We liked Plone, as well, but we felt taking on a new programming environment (Python) for something as critical as our web presence was not sensible.

The Ann Arbor District Library has a Drupal based system, though it's been actually designed and not just put into place with the stock set of Drupal default settings. There's a whole lotta ugly in the base configuration which is all customizable, given enough patience and attention to detail.

I would be remiss, actually, if I did not include a video of the Drupal song.

Library book overdue reminders, a survey

I have some books that are overdue (hey how does that happen). Here's some ways that libraries are helping people remember that books need to be renewed, and other sorts of things that help out in the process.

First, the nature of the problem and a confession: Amanda has a problem with overdue library books:

Those who know me in real life often already know this fact, but I feel I have to confess it a bit more publicly to try to solve this problem once and for all. All my life, I’ve had problems returning books to libraries on time. There is a library in Osaka which, I’m sure, has my picture on the wall (with a caption saying “dangerous book-stealing foreigner” in polite Japanese). A rather embarrassing overdue library book situation arose in Germany when I realised my mother-in-law - we’d redirected our mail to her - would soon receive an overdue notice for Irvine Welsh’s book Porno - but it just took so long to read with all that irritatingly slang dialogue. And when I returned to Perth, the only way I was able to get a new library card was by using my new married name and “forgetting” about previously being a member of that library system.

So what do libraries do to help this out?

Overdue notices by postcard - Demco has a series of industrial style cards to notify you of your transgresssions.

Real Voice is pitching a service to libraries that delivers reminders by synthesized voice, SMS, and email; they also supply debt collectors with similar services.

Singapore libraries notify borrowers via SMS; you configure the details to set it up for how may days in advance you want it.

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Jenny Levine has a good late 2007 survey of mashing on the library which has musings on library first applications of Twitter.

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This deserves to be longer, but I want to send it out.

innovations in library book cover tagging

The usual complaint about how libraries mark up books to go on the shelves is that the call number is not very meaningful, not very legible, and hides some actual useful information about the book like the author or the publisher. Since libraries often shelve spine-out, these are real considerations in making the stacks browsable.

Lou Rosenfeld sends this account of informational book labels from the Information Aesthetics weblog, which in turn refers to the original Valerie Madill project: looking at libraries: defining space through content .

Read it! because you have no idea what you are dealing with. (there are many details and considerations involved in this project, one would likely experience and notice them using the system in a real life situation. However, this is a website, allow me to enlighten you) Senior grad project at the Emiliy Carr University under the supervision of professor Sandra Hoffmann Robbiani.

The spine labels for the library are designed for the library function, not the bookstore function: they have bright, clear, uniform type, they are color coded per the classification scheme (so that books in QA are all bright orange), and everything that would have been on the old catalog card is printed on the side.

Practical for actual use? Hard to know. Possible for home library? Oh certainly.

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.

Denver Public Library Podcast - Children's books

If you have kids, and occasionally they ask you to repeat the same story over and over again, here's some help from the Denver Public Library. They have put together podcasts of stories for kids read by their storytellers and reproduced with the permission of the publishers they are working with.

Titles include one we found as a favorite:

You Can Do It, Sam
Mother Bear helped Sam bake cakes for all his friends, but can he deliver them all by himself? Read by Ella.

You Can Do It, Sam. Text copyright 2003 by Amy Hest. Illustrations copyright 2003 by Anita Jeram. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Inc., Cambridge, MA.

Stephen Abram notes also a made-in-Canada children's books podcast called Just One More Book with 400 episodes of reviews and recommendations for kids books and author interviews (but not the books themselves, in general).

LibraryThing has a new API for books info

Tim Spalding noted a new LibraryThing books API, intended for use for designing widgets for a browser.

I haven't dug into it yet, but what I told him is that I'd love to end up with some relatively easy-to-type URL that would let me make links to LibraryThing, Amazon, and the Ann Arbor District Library, all with a nice cover image. (For AADL I should be also able to get title availability.) It looks doable, but I probably need to write down more about that to make sense of it for anyone else.

A good example of this code in use is the CoverFlip sample app that MMcM put together.

More, I'm sure, to come; for now see the api developers group.