[Noisebridge-discuss] Open source web based library catalog system?

Neil Kandalgaonkar neilk at brevity.org
Tue Jun 8 20:41:54 UTC 2010


On 06/08/2010 12:57 PM, Miah Johnson wrote:

>    - I can't imagine it would be too difficult for somebody at Noisebridge
>    to implement this from scratch.

Famous last words. ;)

>    - Make it a project of one of the programming classes.

You might want to leverage the API at openlibrary.org.

http://openlibrary.org/
http://openlibrary.org/developers/api

If they have a book, you can download a lot of data about it. If they
don't have the book, use *their* interface to enter and store info about
books. Then populate your own db via their API. This secondarily
benefits the rest of the planet.

Then the system becomes a lot simpler. You don't have to make an
interface to record books. You just have to make a system to record
borrowings and users. e.g.:

Collection:
- openlibrary_url (primary key)
- (other stuff fetched from open library)

Borrowings:
- borrowing_id  (autoincremented)
- openlibrary_url  (foreign key)
- user_id   (foreign key)
- begintime DATETIME NOT NULL
- endtime   DATETIME  /* can be null if it's still out */

Users
- user_id
- (the usual stuff you store about people)

There's all kinds of other stuff you could add, but this would work and
wouldn't take a lot of time.


-- 
Neil Kandalgaonkar (   <neilk at brevity.org>



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