drupalib A place for library drupallers to hang out

The Libraries birds of a feather session at the Bay Area Drupal Camp will be held at 11:15 AM on Sunday, October 12th. The schedule should be up soon at http://badcamp.net/

Blogging this I was sitting next to Karen Coombs, Library Web Chick. Check out her coverage as well.

So far (start of day 2) there has been lots of discussion about Drupal. I'll update this post as more Drupal stuff comes up throughout the conference.

Just a preliminary head's up that we'll be having a Library Drupal BoF as part of the Chicago Drupal Camp taking place at UIC on Friday & Saturday, Oct. 24 & 25.

They're still working on the program, but the Library BoF will be on Friday (10/24) in the early afternoon (probably starting at 2pm or 3pm). Location: SSB Building (Harrison & Racine) in Chicago.

The goals (besides getting together) are:

• Showcase library-related Drupal projects in the Chicagoland area.
• Talk about future plans and aspirations, field questions and compare experiences.

So whether you've done a project or would like to do a project, this event is for you. We had a great time doing this in Anaheim for ALA and it's good to organize something similar for the home team.

The website isn't up yet but it'll be at: http://drupalcampchicago.org/

They're still taking suggestions for programs at:
http://drupalcampchicago.org/speaker-submission

Mark you calendars today!

An article in the June 2008 Information Technology in Libraries by Jennifer Bowen indicates that Drupal will be used as the public and staff (administration and cataloging) interfaces for the University of Rochester's eXtensible Catalog. The article is available online via the U of R institutional repository.

oai2forcck provides an OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) gateway for content type created with CCK (Drupal 5 only). If you don't already know what OAI-PMH is, you probably don't care about this module.

Some examples. All expose unqualified Dublin Core.

[Originally posted 2008-08-12, edited and expanded 2008-08-13]

This new module, released on Aug. 8, looks like it has potential as a lightweight ILS. It allows site admins to define content types for books and other circulating physical material, to define copies of the books (called 'items'), and to define simple borrower records. Here's a late-night walkthrough of how this module works.

If anyone is intererested in having a rich text editor in Drupalib, post a comment. I've used BUEditor and FCKeditor on a couple of sites, the former being a nice, simple tag editor and the latter being a full blown WYSIWYG editor. I'd favor BUEditor simply because it's so lightweight and easy to use, but that's just my preference.

I've added a "commercial services" directory -- if you provide Drupal consulting, development, or hosting services for libraries, feel free to add an entry.

Also, Drupalib now has 106 members -- wow!

I've just joined drupalib so I thought I'd post this introduction to the community.

My name is Michael Baynger and I am a usability expert with a growing interest in Drupal. I am also interested in finding out more about how Drupal is being used in libraries so I’m glad to have found this site.

In particular, I’m interested in how library staff users are coping with content administration tasks and what site administrators are doing with regard to setting up UIs for their end users. Of course there are many issues that relate to library patrons as well.

Drupal in Libraries (Library Technology Reports 44:4, May/June 2008) by Andy Austin and Christopher Harris is a valuable overview of Drupal for a library audience. The 37-page issue is approachable and organized well, and provides enough detail to interest potential Drupal implementers while not overloading them with jargon or highly technical explanations of Content Management Systems or Drupal's architecture.