Many of our academic libraries have very byzantine 'hours' policies.
Developing UI that can express these sensibly is time-consuming and
difficult; by doing a great job at it (like Sean has), you can make the
byzantine hours logic a lot easier for users to understand... but you
can still only do so much to make convoluted complicated library hours
easy to deal with and understand for users.
If libraries can instead simplify their hours, it would make things a
heck of a lot easier on our users. Synchronize the hours of the
different parts of the library as much as possible. If some service
points aren't open the full hours of the library, if you can make all
those service points open the _same_ reduced hours, not each be
different. Etc.
To some extent, working on hours displays to convey byzantine hours
structures can turn into the familiar case of people looking for
technological magic bullet solutions to what are in fact business and
social problems.
On 11/27/13 9:25 AM, Sean Hannan wrote:
I¹d argue that library hours are nothing but edge cases.
Staying open past midnight is actually a common one. But how do you deal
with multiple library locations? Multiple service points at multiple
library locations? Service points that are Œby appointment only¹ during
certain days/weeks/months of the year? Physical service points that are
under renovation (and therefore closed) but their service is being carried
out from another location?
When you have these edge cases sorted out, how do you display it to users
in a way that makes any kind of sense? How do you get beyond shoehorning
this massive amount of data into outmoded visual paradigms into something
that is easily scanned and processed by users? How do you make this data
visualization work on tablets and phones?
The data side of calendaring is one thing (and for as standard and
developed as the are, iCal and Google Calendar¹s data formats don¹t get it
100% correct as far as I¹m concerned). Designing the interaction is wholly
another.
It took me a good two or three weeks to design the interaction for our new
hours page (http://www.library.jhu.edu/hours.html) over the summer. There
were lots of iterations, lots of feedback, lots of user testing. ³User
testing? Just for an hours page?² Yes. It¹s one of our most highly sought
pieces of information on our website (and yours too, probably). Getting it
right pays off dividends.
I don¹t know if you¹d find it useful (our use cases are not necessarily
your use cases), but I ended up writing up the whole process as a blog
post
(http://blogs.library.jhu.edu/wordpress/2013/07/anatomy-of-an-hours-page/).
-Sean
‹
Sean Hannan
Senior Web Developer
Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
On 11/26/13, 6:41 PM, "Barnes, Hugh" <[email protected]> wrote:
Great edge case, thanks for sharing that one!
I think currently that could only be _encoded_ as a separate opening in
the CSV file for loading into the database, which won't work because of
my assumption. There simply isn't a way to express it. The relevant
fields for the load file are startdate, enddate, opentime, and closetime,
the last two being formatted as only "hh:mm", so it's assumed they relate
to each single day in the range.
However, I edited a "closes" field value directly in the test database,
and to my surprise it rendered sensibly. I would have thought it would be
rejected by a validity test I have which checks that the day portion of
the start and closing datestamps are the same [1].
I can't justify spending time on this in the near future, since it's a
use case we are unlikely to need here. However, I'll log an issue, or you
may. Thanks again.
Cheers
Hugh
[1] https://github.com/LincolnUniLTL/calibr/blob/master/lib/app.php#L113
-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of
Bohyun Kim
Sent: Wednesday, 27 November 2013 11:28 a.m.
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] calibr: a simple opening hours calendar
Hugh,
Thanks for sharing. A quick question. If a library opens past midnight,
does that count more than one opening a day or no?
~Bohyun
On Nov 26, 2013, at 5:04 PM, "Barnes, Hugh" <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hi folks
I took a calendar script posted to this list by Andrew Darby some time
ago and made some changes. I don't think there is any of Andrew's code
left, so I've rebranded it with an acknowledgement. (If I had my time
again, I might have coded it from scratch rather than built it over
Andrew's script, but that's somewhat academic.)
The whole scoop is in the readme on Github:
http://github.com/LincolnUniLTL/calibr
TLDR: With PHP, MySQL, some fiddling and data entry, you can publish a
library opening hours calendar on your website in more than one language
if you wish. It's a little quicker to enter common period patterns than
it used to be in Google Calendar. The output is more accessible,
customisable, multilingual, semantic, and hopefully more extensible
(iCal etc) than previously.
Here's a branded reference implementation:
http://library2.lincoln.ac.nz/hours - it won't necessarily reflect the
latest version.
Use it, improve it, feed back, or log issues right there on Github if
that works for you.
Many thanks to Andrew for providing the foundation!
Cheers
Hugh Barnes
Digital Access Coordinator
Library, Teaching and Learning
Lincoln University
Christchurch
New Zealand
p +64 3 423 0357
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