After such a long hiatus from blogging, I feel like I owe it to those of you who are still subscribed to explain my absence.
In short, I’m busy.
We’re building a new library which will open in January (watch the time-lapse construction videos!). Of course, that’s not enough to do, so we’re launching our new website on September 1st, which gives me… well, not very much time to myself these days.
It was just about a year ago that I started working at Darien Library. The construction site was little more than a razed patch of dirt. It’s now something quite different. When it’s done, it will be quite clear that there has never been a library built quite like this one. From rethinking our entire classification system to planning how to use a building that is wired to the hilt, to an RFID conversion, to a major web redesign, to some other things yet-to-be-announced, we’re about to enter a period of serious metamorphosis.
So, I’ve put this blog on a slow burn while I tend to a few other things.
I was literally getting up at 5am and getting to bed well past midnight during ALA. I suppose that means it was a success.
Many thanks (and fond farewell) to Leslie Burger, who initiated and sponsored the Transformation Track sessions. I didn’t go to three of them so, alas, no T-shirt for me. I felt that the technology session (I co-chaired with Alan Gray) was very good, but how could it not be with speakers like Lori Ayer, Roy Tennant, and Casey Bisson? Incidentally, if your library is looking to retain the services of a first-class library consultant, consider getting in touch with Lori. She has made her presentation available online. Casey has also posted his presentation with commentary. Thanks to these three for a fine program.
Also, Eli Neiburger was kind enough to join me and be the spokesperson for AADL at my “Building the Next Generation Public Library Websites with Drupal” talk. My slides are now available and can always be found on my files page.
Sunday was a crazy day for me, I had about 15 minutes to grab a quick snack and head over the the Top Tech Trends panel. Kudos to LITA, who already has audio online. I really enjoyed participating in the discussion.
OCLC hosted the Sunday night bloggers salon. A big thanks to them for putting on such a fun and raucous gathering of good people. It’s always nice to catch-up with folks and put faces to names.
I had a great chat with Jon Udell and Ed Vielmetti last week during a recorded podcast that Jon has made available on his new blog. Jon is a great podcaster–he has the ability to make a session feel like a conversation and less like an interview which makes for a very interesting and enjoyable experience as one of the participants.
Anyway, we talked about superlibrarians and superpatrons within the context of Eric Von Hippel’s notion of “lead users.” This is an area that should be of great interest to libraries–specifically, how do we identify those lead users, then enable them to mash-up, remix, and create services, tools, and content. We can learn a great deal more from our users than we are currently used to and Von Hippel shows us how in a series of online videos and papers.
I mostly talked about PatREST–its history, what it is, where it might lead, and my decision to build a patron-oriented API on top of our existing ILS. Ed shared some interesting insights into his perspective as a consumer of PatREST and other non-standard distribution channels made available on AADL’s system.
I have a good excuse for dropping off the face of the biblioblogosphere for a month.
It only took a year, but I finally got permission to go ahead with implementing what I’ve dubbed “The SOPAC” here at AADL. That would be “cute-speak” for Social OPAC. The SOPAC represents a slew of features that I’ve wanted to implement for quite some time now. I’m rather excited to see if library users will respond to these tools in an OPAC setting as much as Web 2.0 users have to commercial social networking sites. I’m fairly confident they will. Mainly, I’m relieved that I no longer need to talk conceptually about features I’ve been planning to build on top of the catalog.
So what is the SOPAC? It’s basically a set of social networking tools integrated into the AADL catalog. It gives users the ability to rate, review, comment-on, and tag items. The concept is nothing new, but the nature of our systems do not yield readily to this kind of retrofitting–something I plan to really start tackling in earnest, but that’s a topic for another post.
If you’re wondering (and didn’t know already), AADL’s automation system is III which recently released a software package called “Encore” that does some of what the SOPAC does. We did not purchase it, nor do we intend to. Instead we’re going to use the money we saved to buy a Lexus. *grin*
Anyway, I’ve been messing around a bit with Snapz Pro, and thought that since this is a pretty big upgrade to AADL’s site, I would include a screencast covering most of the new features. So for those with 15 minutes or so to kill (ignore the screaming kids in the background):
The “front door” to the SOPAC is, of course, the main catalog search screen. Drupal’s API made development of this code relatively painless. For example, the blocks on the right-hand side use Drupal’s hook_block function, making the development of those blocks simply a matter of writing a function that would return the content. In this case, the right-hand column contains search, tag, and review information.
Let’s take a look at some of those blocks:
These two blocks represent the contextual nature of SOPAC. The first block appears in the regular SOPAC, while the second is displayed in the use management tools.
Here are some sample review pages:
Top of review page:
Reviews themselves:
Public view of all my reviews:
Private view of all my reviews:
While writing a review, you can simultaneously add tags for the item you’re reviewing. Or you can simply tag catalog items without reviewing them. Here are some same examples of the tag system:
Personal tag cloud (My tags in cloud-vew mode):
Personal tag list. This is where users can manage their tags. Delete, modify, view, etc.
List of items in the catalog tagged with “dogs”:
Feel free to visit the AADL catalog to tag and/or review some items. You do need an account to create content, but you don’t need a library card to get an account, so these features are not limited to cardholders in any way.
Because I feel that this version of AADL.org is a significant milestone, I’ve made a tarball of the source code publicly available for download. Included in the tarball is our middle-ware “glue” that allows us to interface Drupal with the III server in addition to all the SOPAC code and supporting libraries. Bear in mind that this code will definitely not work out-of-the-box but could definitely be made to work with any III server with XMLOPAC support.
You can download the package here, or from my files section.
Life’s had me buried, so I’ve neglected my blog–be kind and cut me some slack!
At any rate, my little holiday treat this year is a catalog search cloud for the AADL catalog. For about four months now, I’ve been collecting search statistics on queries done against our catalog with the sole intention of creating this little proof-of-concept app.
Basically, it looks at the {x} most popular searches in the past {x} days and generates, what we all recognize, as a tag cloud of those searches with links into the catalog for each.
I say this is a “proof-of-concept” feature because in the coming months, we’ll be launching into our AADL.ORG 3.3 development push which will, hopefully, include a whole lot more of this type of stuff.
Have a safe, happy holiday. I won’t take 2 months to do another post, I promise!
After such a long hiatus from blogging, I feel like I owe it to those of you who are still subscribed to explain my absence.
I had a great chat with 
