When your Users Group has its own Library, and the Librarian is sick of lugging around all the books to every meeting, it’s time to make technology do the work.

For several months now, at our Kernel Panic Linux Users’ Group meetings, our Librarian has been absent due to scheduling conflicts, and before that, both he and his predecessor have complained about the troubles involved in lugging around three cases of books to and from the meetings.

After giving this some degree of thought, and knowing that the new web site is based on Plone, I’ve decided that my first active project in some time now is going to be a web-based library system, complete with a borrowing request mechanism and lending tracking. Why? To prevent the Librarian from having to carry all those books, of course. Also, it will then be possible to browse the library’s collection online for the whole month between meetings, and, if I provide a suitable machine for use at the meetings themselves, we can even browse the library there, if we have Internet access.

This is an intriguing project to me, mainly because it’s not really a simple problem, but one that, if solved elegantly, will appear simple to the site users.

Stay tuned…

This entry was posted on Monday, April 25th, 2005 at 3:06 pm and is filed under General Geekery, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.