Sunday, August 7, 2016

Library Technology

"Green Leopard Wonderland"--Sunday, 8/7/16

I thought this beige, brown, and floral pattern outfit was a good starting point for debuting the third of the three 88 cent skorts I purchased last winter.

From designingfrommycloset.wordpress.com

This one has a color scheme that isn't exactly as suitable to my strongest colors (in terms of what I like, what I have a lot of, and what looks good) as it could be, but it was cute and only 88 cents so I thought I'd give it a shot.  For its first outing, I paired it with another green/brown print and the Wonderland graphic tank that goes with everything.


*Beige/orange/green floral skort (thrifted, Walmart), $0.88/wear
White Rabbit "Wonderland" tank (Disney Alice/Kohls), $12.00/wear
Brown flats by Frye, $6.17/wear
Green leopard scarf (thrifted), $1.14/wear

Outfit total: $20.19/wear

The spotted rabbit coloration pattern is called "broken," like on this broken mini rex.  Interestingly, the broken gene En is dominant over the en variant that would have caused this bunny to be dark all over.  There are two types of broken patterns--the spotted version (sported by this rabbit) and the blanket version (which has a larger area of the dark color against the white).

If it ain't broke, it's enen.

In other news...Today I used the Coldville Public Library web site to request books for the first time.  I am very disappointed that after requesting a book, there is no way to temporarily suspend that request--which means, in effect, that it is not possible to use their system to manage your reading list in any way. 

A good system lets you add as many books as you want but mark them with a suspend status so that you can keep a list of books you want on the list without actually requesting them all at once.  For example, Snow City's system lets you suspend individual books or your entire list, and you can do this with a specific date for the suspension to end or indefinitely.  So as you come across books of interest, you can add and suspend them.  For books with longer waiting lists, you can let yourself move up the waiting list and then if you're not ready for the book when it is soon going to be available to you, you can temporarily suspend the request--and then when you're ready for the book, you can cancel the suspension, which allows you to reserve your place in the queue.

The Coldville system only allows you to cancel requests, not suspend them.  I feel like this is a feature that my sister could program for them in about 10 minutes so it's frustrating that they don't have it.

I don't know yet whether Coldville also limits the number of books you can put on your list.  About 10 years ago, the Austin library system had a pretty low limit (like 20 items?), which sucked for people who were interested in books, CDs, and/or DVDs.

Robert looked into it and discovered that the Coldville libraries only started having a self-check system about a year ago...which is crazy, as this feature has been around for a couple of decades in other library systems.

I was surprised by how much less developed the Coldville online book management is compared to the one in Tulsa because I thought the size of the two systems would be about the same. But Robert looked up the numbers and discovered that Coldville serves a population under half as large as the Tulsa system does.  This is because Coldville's library system serves only the city of Coldville, while Tulsa's is a city-county system.

I really miss the Snow City library system (which was also a county-wide system) with its much nicer central library and its more useful online book management program.  It was also a shorter walk from my apartment to the central library in Snow City than the corresponding walk is here in Coldville.  This said, I don't miss commuting from Snow City to Coldville for work, so this inconvenience in minor in the scheme of things.  I'll just have to keep my list of wanted books someplace else (currently it exists on pieces of paper thrown into an accordion file).

6 comments:

Mom said...

Tulsa also has a For Later feature that lets you keep a list of books, DVDs, etc that you don't want to reserve yet. Beats keeping a paper list!

Sally said...

Oooh, I like! Yet another feature to wish our library had.

Jen M. said...

Well, you need a new database column, update the API.... But yeah, should be pretty easy to implement.

Sally said...

See, you could do it with 92% of your brain focused on Superbaby!

mom said...

I'm sure your library purchased a program that didn't include these nice features. They probably didn't want to pay for them.

Sally said...

Mom, good point. I hadn't really considered that they had purchased an off the shelf program. I was just assuming that somebody programmed it for them. But it makes sense that they would have just bought the cheapest off the shelf program they could get. I don't like it but I can understand it.