drupalib A place for library drupallers to hang out

I’m doing research on usability issues for librarians and would greatly appreciate your input in a number of key areas. In this discussion topic, I want to start off with a look at usability requirements for users of Drupal systems, either current or planned.

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.

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.

Okay, we'll be meeting for our Drupal4lib BoF on Sun. (6/29, 3:30p-5:00p) -- in the LITA Bloggers Room (till they chase us out).

This will be an informal get-together of people to talk about how they've implemented Drupal or how they'd like to implement Drupal. Whether you're a newbie or pro is fine. Everyone is welcome. I'll see if I can dig up a projector so people can do brief presentations of their projects.

Please leave comments and suggestions.

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 just released a new version of the module which creates a
Drupal-based OPAC from an existing Millennium WebOpac.

Read more at:
http://stupendousamazing.blogspot.com/2008/05/drupal-millennium-module-1...

The MARC-to-Drupal conversion still has a few issues... =) Need a bit
more testers to iron these out!

I'd be happy to help anyone with a test install.

For now check out our live demo at:
http://biblioteca.mty.itesm.mx/pasteur

For our Drupal4lib BoF, it looks like Sunday 6/29, sometime in the afternoon is the most popular time. Aaron's schedule of "Afternoon with LITA" was pretty helpful: Top Tech Trends (1:30-3:00), LITA Awards (3:00-4:00), and LITA President's program (4:00-5:30).

[Personally, I'm most interested in the Top Tech Trends, so -- again personally -- I'd be okay with anything after around 3pm. ]

As a way to nail down the time, I set up a Doodle poll so that people can specify their preference(s):

http://www.doodle.ch/85b5bs3gcyvnppcb

Location tentatively is in the LITA's Blogger Room. We could go out for dinner afterwards...

In any case, if you've got any comments, feel free to reply to me or leave them here.

I wanted to write up some of what we've got in the works just in case anyone has filled some of the missing pieces yet :)

Our virtual reference service records transcripts. The transcripts go in custom nodes. A custom index extracts URLs and another custom table extracts phrases from the patron's question. Phrases are groups of two or three words that don't contain a stopword and aren't broken by punctuation.

The slow, slow prototype, http://www.oregonlibraries.net/guides, shows popular phrases in questions in the past week. Clicking on a phrase (or searching for another) shows websites shared in transcripts where the question contained that phrase, sorted by how many times it happened.