[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Academic Reserves

[Dan Scott]

On Wed, Dec 01, 2010 at 10:41:28PM -0500, Art W Rhyno wrote:
<snip> 
> Robin Isard at Algoma has been working on enhancing the bookbag mechanism 
> within Evergreen specifically for reserves and this will add to the 
> options as well. Robin's been pulled into other projects, a common theme 
> for all of us, but I think he hopes to get his enhancements in place 
> before the end of the year. Bookbags are a good temporary measure if 
> nothing else, our previous system was arguably not as flexible for 
> reserves as what bookbags offer out of the box so we haven't had too many 
> transition issues.

To add to this, Laurentian is using bookbags (one per course) for the
basic purpose of collecting together records of interest for the given
course, then pulling those into a relatively basic interface for
finding a list of your course reserves. Kevin Beswick is the brains
behind this approach, and had developed a nicer UI with features like
filtering... but ran into trouble getting it working on IE, and that
fell by the wayside in lieu of the work that Robin and Art are doing on
their respective pieces.

You can see what it looks like by going to our catalogue
(http://laurentian.concat.ca) and clicking the "Course reserves" link on
the footer. The course "GEOG 3497" is a reasonable example.

Our current workflow is roughly: 
 
1. Faculty ask for items to be put on reserve (we have a longstanding
tradition of paper forms for this purpose)

2. If the item already exists in our ILS, circ staff log in as a special
bookbag user and create a new public bookbag (if necessary) for that
course using a "<course code> - <professor name>" naming convention,
then add the item to the bookbag

3. If the item needs to be catalogued (professor's personal copy or the
like) it gets sent to our technical services department for a rush
cataloging job. If we're still using this system on 2.0, we hope to
repurpose the brief cataloging form that was developed for acquisitions
for this purpose so that circ staff can create the record directly in
most cases.

4. On a regular basis, a cron job pulls the list of public bookbags for
that user and generates a sqlite database on the server where the little
reserves app runs. A PHP script generates the JSON feed that the Dojo
Javascript app turns into the grid of course reserves.

And... I think that's it.