[kwlug disc.] a bunch of books i'm willing to *loan* to the LUG

[Joe]

unsolicited at gto.net wrote:
> A nifty solution to this would certainly catch the attention of
> several here. e.g. Enter an ISBN number, details come in, references
> back to book's web site (for table of contents, sample chapters,
> etc.), member comments ('good book', 'not as easy a read as {this
> library} book'), who's got it, etc., etc., long term forward/backward
> compatibility with old/new entries, etc. I know nothing of Wiki's -
> don't know how/if it can do forms, etc., etc.
If someone knows of an existing web application that already has that 
functionality built in that would be a wonderful solution. Or if someone 
has the php and mysql development skills along with the interest and 
motivation, they could tap into http://isbndb.com/. However, that's 
beyond my current skill set.

Paul Nijjar wrote:
>     Somebody volunteer to be librarian (responsible for signouts and 
> making sure that books get returned when the original owners want them 
> back) and this can happen. The medium is irrelevant -- it could be a 
> module or a wiki or whatever.
>
>     If "wiki" is meant to be shorthand for "the signout system will 
> magically take care of itself!" then I think this is a bad idea. We 
> don't need a formal librarian position, but we do need somebody who 
> will be responsible for the job, just as people are responsible for 
> mailing list administration, website maintenance, etc. now. That is 
> what I see as the biggest bottleneck.
>
>     Right now nobody has committed to making sure signouts are 
> enforced, accurate, etc. This is not a small job. This has not been a 
> huge deal so far because we have so many books and people don't care 
> about them enough to raise a fuss when somebody borrows one and 
> doesn't return it promptly, but it could easily explode into an issue 
> if/when people want their books back.
>
> - Paul
I can see how having a designated librarian would be useful where a 
single person would be responsible for everyone else's books.

My thoughts on the wiki suggestion were to use it as a quick and easy 
white board solution where anyone could add their own book collections 
and keep track of the name of the person borrowing the book(s) and date 
they borrowed it. It wouldn't be much more than a physical piece of 
paper someone would use to sign out a book except that it's digitized 
which makes it searchable and tracks it's history of edits by user 
account. Links to the ISBN # or book information could be added manually 
although this might end up being more work depending on how large the 
book collections are. I only have about 30 books in my collection so 
manual input wouldn't be too much trouble for mine. There's probably 
better and more elegant ways of setting something up with an ISBN db, 
etc. but a simple wiki could be a quick  and easy setup option to share 
our data on as well.

~Joe