drupalib A place for library drupallers to hang out

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.

The Access program featured a Drupal panel this morning. During the panel one of the presenters asked for a show of hands on "how many familiar with Drupal" -- I'd say about a fifth of the 200 people. The presenters, and some notes from their parts of the panel presentation, are below.

Ilana Kingsley, University of Alaska Fairbanks spoke about her library's experience with Drupal. They chose Drupal because it was easy out of the box using contributed modules, and because of the rich taxonomy capability. However, she warned the audience about the quality of some contributed modules. She also described the largely manual process of migrating existing content to Drupal, and performing document analysis before creating custom content types. They associate the custom content types with specific user roles to manage create/update permissions on those content types.

I was interersted to hear that some of her staff users were confused by the 'view' and 'edit' terminology at the tops of nodes. They wanted to be able to edit their nodes while in the 'view' tab. This anecdote illustrates some of Drupal's rough usability edges, a topic that has been discussed here on Drupalib and in the wider Drupal community.

One cool feature on the Fairbanks site is the movie browser, which screen scapes their OPAC for movie data and mashes up additional content from IMDB and RottenTomatoes.

Debra Riley-Huff, University of Mississippi Libraries, demoed her library's subject guides and government documents subsection. She described Drupal's theming capabilities and how important it is to pay attention to themes on core or contrib updates (presumably between major version updates). She recommended basing custom themes on zen but points peole to the tutorials available for retheming Garland. Their site uses Nice Menus and CCK heavily, and she described a module (I think Multiblock) combined with fine-grained user roles to to allow different users to add blocks in their pages.

Harish Nayak, University of Rochester, River Campus supplied a lot of information on how they used User Centered Design to plan their website (yet to be launched), describing how they analyzed how each department maintained content. Nancy Foster has published a paper on this process.

Rochester uses Zen for their theme, Harish calling it a 'starter kit' for theming. He showed an unmodified Zen theme and then the modified version, providing a dramatic example of what you can do with a minimalist Drupal theme. He also described Rochester's use of the MySite module to allow library staff to customize their pages, and described it as a 'panels for the end user'.

Dave Mitchell, from London Public Library, described how their site uses Drupal's powerful taxonomy functionality in several innovative ways. For example, they have implelemted a feature that allows new library items to appear on specific pages in addition to a more general list, and to attach like-tagged comments to pages other than the one that the comment was made on. They use the Taxonomy Theme module for section-specific subtheming, and have created a 'site map' with a taxonomy, which allows users to choose where they want their page to show up in the site structure by selecting the desired location from this taxonomy. Dave said that rich taxomony capabilites were a major factor in LPL choosing Drupal for their website.

Nick Ruest, McMaster University, showed http://digitalcollections.mcmaster.ca, which uses CCK to create DC metadata for describing items from McMaster's digitized collections. He wrote his own OAI gateway to allow harvesting of this metadta (there is now another contributed OAI module that is more generalized). Nick described how their site uses Automatic Node Titles module and how they modified it to batch rename related nodes. Their site alwo uses a modified version of the Timeline module, modified to work with the current MIT SIMILE Timeline.

In a separate session, the thunder talks, two Drupal modules were demoed, the first being UPEI's Fedora module and the second Simon Fraser University's CONTENTdm module. Also, one of the Hackfest reports described how one team prototyped integrating Evergreen ILS with SOPAC2 in Drupal.

Edit, Oct. 4: There was also a Drupal birds of a feather session at the end of yesterday's session, but I couldn't attend. Hopefully someone who did will post a brief summary.