[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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