drupalib A place for library drupallers to hang out

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.

Paul Albert, Digital Services Librarian at Weill Cornell Medical Library, shares this video that might be useful to others advocating Drupal in the their library.

Learning Drupal 6 Module Development by Matt Butcher is a useful counterpart to Pro Drupal Development (PDD) in two ways -- it updates some of the content in PDD (which covers Drupal 5.x) and it focuses on some topics not covered in sufficient detail in the earlier, and intentionally more general, book, such as AJAX/JSON, in-module theming, and installation profiles.

I've created a vocablulary called 'Category' (figuring I'd use the language of the users =8^) that can be applied to pretty much every content type on Drupalib, and seeded it with the following terms:

Advocacy
Documentation
Getting started
How to
Reviews
Training

Not sure if any of you noticed (well, at least a couple of you did since you emailed me), but the downtime today was due to a move to a new web hosting service. My previous one, WebServe, was sinking fast so I bailed. Their customer support over the last few months has dwindled to NULL, and last weekend I actually phoned tech support and got routed to a call center somewhere where "Jack" the dweeb wasn't even able to look up my user info based on my domain. His technical knowledge was equally lacking.

Spreading the luv between the larger Drupal and Joomla communities (http://drupal.org/node/213524, etc.), and following up on a thread in code4lib and other lists, I wanted to dash off a quick lunchtime post about the Joomla in Libraries site. My initial reaction is wow!

I haven't posted to drupalib for a while so I thought I'd describe one of the Drupal projects I'm working on (the other is an update to my search_attachments module.)

For the last month or so I've been developing a Drupal 6.x module that allows searching of collections hosted in a CONTENTdm server from within a Drupal website. This development is being done as part of the MulticulturalCanada digitization initiative that Simon Fraser University Library, where I work, is the lead partner on. We are using Drupal for the public website, but are using CONTENTdm as the collection management application for close to half a million pages of newspapers, several thousand still images, several thousand books, and a few hundred audio interviews that make up the MulticulturalCanada umbrella collection. SFU is partnering with five other institutions on the selection and digitization of the content, and with several educators who are developing learning materials to accompany the specific collections.

http://blogs.ala.org/ittsupdate.php?title=new_online_communities_rfp contains links to the RFP.

This story on d.o. describes how the University of Minnesota Libraries is helping make Drupal better -- it's awesome to see this kind of collaboration. Results of the study will be presented at Drupalcon Boston. Some details are about the process are available.

Believe it or not, I am just now getting around to upgrading to Drupal 5. When Drupal 6 is released, probably in January some time, security patches for 4.x will stop being issued. It's time to move on.

So, after much backing up of my database and drupal files, figuring out which versions of 4.x modules I was using, and debugging SQL errors, I've updated Drupalib to the latest versions of Drupal, CCK, Views, and secondary modules like CAPTCHA and workspace. Everything seems to be intact except my hairline.