the library workshop

Watzek Library's ILL department just had a visit from some folks at the Multnomah County Library, the big public library system serving most of the Portland Metro area. They were interested in a little hack to our Clio interlibrary loan system that allows us to check out ILL books on our III integrated library system without any rekeying.

As Jeremy and Jenny showed the application in action, I was really admiring the resourcefulness of it. Nothing fancy--just the DIY powertools of the digital workshop: Expect (to talk to a legacy black box III system), MySQL, PHP, and especially a PHP function to create barcode images. Normal ILL workflow for an incoming book is followed by a couple simple steps, and pretty stickers with barcodes that correspond to records in our ILS emerge.

We're thinking about the software platform (basically LAMP), which powers our website. Should we go to something like Rails? Or should we stick with the simple, blunt LAMP instruments that we're used to.