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

Rubin Abdi rubin at starset.net
Tue Jun 8 21:43:34 UTC 2010


Albert Sweigart wrote, On 20100608 125723:
> I had been planning writing up a simple web app that could do exactly
> this. I've found most of the open source solutions are overkill for
> what we need. My basic plan was almost identical to Rubin's:

I've gone ahead and moved some wiki pages around, added in my set of
requirements into it (including Niel's suggestions of openlibrary)...

https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Resources/Library/Dead_Tree

Please keep in mind that adding requirements or opinions on how things
should be done doesn't actually mean shit until someone does it.

Al: You wanna toss in yours onto that page?

> * Library/user management

I think dealing with user management is going to turn into a pain. My
solution is to just allow the person checking out the book to insert
their name/email at the time of check out. If they wish to stay
anonymous they can just simply mark the book checked out to *blank*. It
shouldn't be that hard to ping a db for a list of users and what they've
got checked out. No one has to be pre-registered, or ever register for
that fact, no passwords, no headache.

> * simple tag system (useful for marking book's category/categories, or
> things like "don't remove from space" or "on loan to noisebridge",
> etc.)

Yes, I forgot to throw that into my set of requirements.

> * Skip the barcode, instead type in the title or author and have
> autocomplete finish the book for us. (Connecting the barcode/webcam
> input to the webapp has kind of been a pain, and I realized that it
> might be easier to skip the barcode stuff altogether. We can always
> add it in later.)

I disagree, I think it would be pretty simple to setup just as long as
particular search fields autofocus and the browser isn't fucking garbage.

> * Quick Amazon.com review lookups.

Like I said, I think Niel's suggestion of openlibrary.org is a smart
direction to go in.

> For privacy, people can use pseudonyms. We're on the honor system
> anyway since people can just walk off with books. But collecting trend
> data will be very useful to determine what type of books we should
> acquire, and which books never get touched.

I think keeping trends of which books get checked out often is a good
idea, but I feel we'll make more people not want to use the system if we
also keep tabs on the checkout history of particular users. Just simply
knowing that John Waters has had the same book checked out for 5 weeks
is as far as I think user relations should go.

> We don't need a website for this, we could just run it on a local
> webserver on a laptop off of a LiveCD (and periodically email off a
> backup of the database).

Regardless where it lives I think having nightly backups would be smart,
plus making the database of searchable books web accessible would rock.

> I'll take charge of this, it's something that I've been planning for a
> while. I'd like any help or input though.

Nick from Hackerbot Labs suggested Koha, as it's a system they're
currently using an apparently works extremely well...

http://koha.org/

-- 
Rubin Abdi
rubin at starset.net



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