Library Web Chic

John Blyberg & Chris Barr

http://thesocialopac.net

Can you customize your opac NO

No personalization

Horrible logins!!

aadl.org sopac 1.0
Internet portal for online library experience
Not enough customizations
Drupal, tagging, reviews, ratings, comments
Issues with critical mass
Tags reviews not representative
Social data not searchable

SOPAC 2.0
Locum - discovery layer
Write an ILS connector for your ILS
Abstractions of connectors
Social data engine for libraries - Insurge
Shared social data between libraries much richer data set
Everything is done within the drupal framework
Search tags in the catalog and tags are part of keyword search
Reviews searchable
Can sort by ratings
Sort by when added
Sort by popularity
Very cool My Account stuff
Version 2.1 will be coming out soon
RSS feeds, multiple cards with an account

Popularity is based on number of holds placed via SOPAC

VuFind - Chris Barr

Library opacs are usable for librarians but not patrons

Too many different interfaces
Creates high learning curve

Advanced search is for advanced users

Top secret search syntax - last name, first name

Customization is not easy and sometimes impossible

No Web 2.0 social stuff

http://www.vufind.org

Easily replace your ILS without your patrons knowing it

Faceted results, author bios, tags, favorites, bookmarkable, book covers, faceted browsing

Availability - on results page!

Reviews from other sources
Amazon
Syndetics

Get a citation (MLA, APA) on the fly
Export Endnote, Refworks
Zotero compatible

Text or email info

Wordpress style template for easy customizations - in next version

Used by
Villanova
National library of Australia
Yale - beta
CARLI system Illinois - beta

Teaching 3 preconferences in 2 days was fun and exhausting. Now the real fun begins.  My last presentation was today. After which I wanted to collapse from exhaustion but I didn’t. Instead there was lots of talking and socializing until quite late. Hopefully, I’ll have enough energy to attend some of the cooler presentations Tuesday. It is great to see all my colleagues and exchange info & notes. Monterey is as always gorgeous and being in this setting is always inspiring. I’ve already met some cool new people and hope to get a chance to collaborate in the future.

I just finished my presentations at IL and I am SO exhausted. I hope to get some sleep tonight rather than obsess. Taking the iPod Touch from work to try out was the best idea I ever had. Read an ebook while waiting for the shuttle to Monterey. Able to get directions to restaurant. Now I’m blogging! Took notes in a couple presentations using notes. Eagerly awaiting the chance to purchase one for myself ASAP.

I arrived in Monterey late last night for Internet Librarian. My conference starts early because I agreed to teach 3 preconference, which I’ve been preparing for months. The preconference I’m most excited about is the open source content management system one. Unfortunately sign-ups aren’t as high as I would have hoped, which is sad because the content is going to absolutely rock. My original co-presenter Amanda Hollister is sick but likely Jason Griffey was able to have his arm twisted to step in. My other preconference are actually first and they are taught with Jason Clark, who is awesome to work with. Our registration for the Web Services preconference is super high and I promise any attendee who is reading this, we will not disappoint.

Once I get through my mass of preconferences I’ve got one more presentation to do. I wasn’t supposed to be presenting but I’m filling in for a extremely good friend who is sick. The best part of the presentation is that I get to show off the Web Service/API for our library website. The developers have made significant progress on it in the last few weeks. The direction the whole thing turned has elevated it from cool, to gosh darn awesome. You see the lead developer for the project stumbled on information about OpenSearch and decided to use that as the backbone for of pieces of the API. This prompted me to provide information on Atom and RSS feeds which are some of formats it will eventually spit out. All and all while the API is far from complete, I truly believe it is going to significantly improve our ability to deliver services to our users. I can’t wait to show it off.

After Monday, I expect to engage is some well-deserved professional development time. There are some presentations I’m excited about including John Blyberg and Chris Barr’s “Solving the OPAC Problem” and Danah Boyd’s keynote, but my favorite part of Internet Librarian is just getting together with people and exchanging ideas, whether that be at the conference, Plumes or the Crown and Anchor.

So I posted a while back that it would be really nice if there was a Drupal module that essential did the same thing as the Wordpress Open Book Book Data plugin. To my great happiness, there now is! Book Post is a module for Drupal (version 6) that does essentially the same thing as the Open Book Book Data plugin. I’m really psyched because this code is the last bit I need to make my test conversion of a public library site to Drupal shine. The only downside is that it only works with PHP 5.2 and my personal sandbox is running on PHP 5.1. Sigh. Still I’ve gotten it installed on a test server at work and below are screenshots of it in action.

I’m hoping also that by looking at the code I can learn a bit about Drupal modules and maybe start working on creating some of my own. For now I’m just psyched that someone was able to write a module to answer my question.

Bruce Washburn from OCLC left a comment on my post about building an iPhone app for WorldCat.

We think an iPhone app for WorldCat is interesting too. We’ve been doing some thinking and experimenting with that idea on the API team, and would really like to hear more about the shape you think a WorldCat iPhone app would take. And you noted a question about how widely you could distribute your app, based on the API Terms. Could you tell us more about how you think your application might present a conflict?

My issues/questions about the Terms of Service stem from the area that discusses Service Levels.

If you are not able to determine the library affiliation of users of your API-based application, the WorldCat API will support indexes and data at the level currently offered to WorldCat.org visitors. For these users, we require that you provide a path to obtain library holdings information as appropriate in your user interface when WorldCat data is presented, with links to participating library OPACs. The WorldCat API provides the OPAC URLs to support these links. The display of library holdings works best when the end user’s location (IP address, ZIP code, or country) can be provided in the link.

The documentation on Service Levels basically says that if you can’t verify a user is one of yours that you may only use certain search indexes and you MUST link back to through WorldCat to local library holdings. Seems reasonable right? Except that the default service level, the one that you need to use if you can’t verify someone is one of your users, doesn’t allow you to limit searching to a particular library. This is not helpful. Particularly since I was thinking about using the WorldCat Registry to allow people to choose a particular library or libraries to default their search to. Let’s be real most users want to see search results from libraries that they can actually get items from. Geographic limits just don’t cut it because it doesn’t take into account the fact that geographic proximity does equal borrowing privileges. Just because I live in the Houston-area doesn’t mean I have borrowing privileges at Rice. Just because I don’t live in upstate NY doesn’t mean that I might have borrowing privileges at Syracuse University. For me this is a huge issue that I want to see OCLC solve not just in the WorldCat API but in WorldCat.org as well.

Some have suggested that OCLC doesn’t want to make these particular indexes available because they are afraid it will undercut the potential revenue of WorldCat Local. But I think that this is a false fear, WorldCat Local offers features and functionality that are not available in WorldCat.org or the WorldCat API. Additionally, for a library to develop their own version of WorldCat Local would be a substantial investment involving either extraction or programming to access real-time, status and holdings information. Most libraries have neither the time nor resources to do this. Also, there is no efficiency gained by individual libraries reinventing WorldCat Local. A better use of my development resources would be to have my staff work on other innovative uses of the WorldCat API.

Another issues I see is with the fact that any applications we build have to use our API key. In the case of the WorldCat Wordpress Widget there is no way to hide the API key from users. Why is this a problem, well what if we want to distribute the widget to our faculty so they can use it in their personal blogs that aren’t on the university blog server. Giving the widget with the key in it to our campus IT people so they could install it on the campus blog server would be reasonable. It seems some application can be build so that the key is hidden. This seems to be what OCLC done with the Facebook app they are distributing. I would guess/hope I would be able to do the same thing with an app for the iPhone/iTouch.

Both of these issues are hampering some of our development efforts at UH. This doesn’t mean that the WorldCat Search API is a bust, it just means that we are still trying to define the boundaries of how useful it can be and in what contexts.

Access Day Two talk

Drupal Content Management and Community for your Library

University of Alaska Fairbanks- Ilana Kingsley

• Library Website -
  • Ad Module
• Browse DVDs - IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Library Catalog

University of Mississippi Library - Debra Rily-Huff

• Subject Guides
• Government Documents

University of Rochester - Harish Nayak

• Still pre-lease, alpha design

London Public Library - Dave Mitchell

McMaster University - Nick Ruest

• Digital Collections portal
• http://pw20c.mcmaster.ca

Key Interesting Points

• Content Analysis to figure out Content Types
• Explaining what a Views is is difficult
• Taxonomy Module very helpful
  • Taxonomy for Theming
  • Taxonomy for Menus
• User Centered Design important
• Nice Menus Module
• CCK module critical
• ProDrupal Development book
• User Customization in Drupal
  • MySite module
    • User can add RSS/Atom feeds from external web sites to their MySite pages
    • Fully integrates with most Drupal content
    • Drag, drop and sort content on user custom personal layout
• Devel Module
• Taxonomy Theme
• OAI-PMH
  • OAI for Bibliographic Module
• Automatic Node Title Module
• Timeline Module

Theming

• Important to pay attention to when you upgrade versions (major version changes) or add modules
• Themes can be changed via CSS modifications, re-theme garland
• Zen is a good stripped down theme to start from
  • Well Documented php and css files
    • Layout
    • Print
    • Subthemes
  • Lots of easy access classes and ideas for CSS developers
  • Mindful CSS class names

I’ve been working with Drupal for the last month in order to migrate an existing public library website into Drupal as sort of a test of Drupal as a CMS. I migrated the same site into Wordpress and have been doing a comparison of the two. One issue I’ve encountered with Drupal is a lack of modules for Drupal 6.x which draw data from external sources. Modules that work like the Wordpress plugins that use shortcodes. For example John Miedema’s OpenBook Book Data plugin for Wordpress.

There is no similar module for Drupal and it is driving me mad. Basically the idea behind this type of module is to insert stuff into Page nodes. This is done by putting a tag into the page which then gets processed on the backend. I think of these as “filter modules” in Drupal. Some of these exist but not enough of them IMHO. Some interesting modules that do this kind of thing include:

• Flickr Module
• Amazon Module
• Video Filter

I want to convert John Miedema’s OpenBook Book Data plugin for Wordpress into this kind of module for Drupal but really don’t have a good enough understanding of Drupal to write the necessary code at this point. Doing something similar with OCLC numbers and WorldCat Search API would be cool too.

So I’ve been doing some work with Drupal in preparation for teaching a class. To really get the hang of how Drupal works as a content management system, I’m test rebuilding a public library website in Drupal. Just like I was test rebuilding the same site in Wordpress.

Some pieces of content are really easy to deal with while others aren’t. Since I’m not going to be putting News on the homepage I had to figure out how to make a page that contained all the stories. Views module to the rescue! I’ve been reading about Views for a while but hadn’t used this module much. This week I dove in and while it took me a while to build my first View, now that I’ve gotten the hang of it I’m astonished at home powerful this module is. It is very, very cool.

One of my favorite modules which is still in development status for Drupal 6 is Insert View. It allows you to use a simple syntax in your node to add a view. I used this module to insert a list of databases into a page that was mostly text and therefore a Page node. Views and CCK completely rock. I can pretty much make any content type I want and display it it different ways different places on the site. One thing I’m still trying to figure out is how to change the format of the Views output. Particularly when I am using fields, because the data doesn’t always come out in the format I want. Same thing can be said for CCK fields in nodes. There doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason for why the CCK fields come out the order they do; at least not one I’ve figure out yet.

Still learning but have made HUGE leaps forward the last week. Test site is almost done and my presentation and handout are coming together. If I could just deal with some of the pesky little issues I’m seeing with CCK Date fields…

After a recent post about using Wordpress as a CMS, Darren commented and asked EXACTLY how I was doing this. My test site isn’t publicly available. So the best I can do is give a screenshot play by play of what I’m doing.

1. Create Link Categories for the way you want to organize your databases. This can be pretty much anyway you want. In the case of my test site I have 7 categories.
2. Create your links in Wordpress using the Links functionality. Make sure you assign them to the categories that you want them to appear in.
3. Install the Blogroll links plugin
   
4. Create pages for each of your database lists. Insert the proper code into each page. Here I’m incorporating the list into a larger page which is about Reference resources.
   

   

How you link to these pages is up to you.

It is a pretty nifty trick that I’d highly reccomend for folks who want to maintain links of lists as part of their website.