Independent of everything that Evergreen is doing, this project could
easily be a wonderful addition to the library literature. One of the
problems that I ran into when searching for lit. related to acq was an
almost complete absence of any concrete descriptions of how things are done
in real libraries.
Actually, this is a problem that I have with the history of librarianship
in general. There seems to be no practical, on the ground, descriptions of
how circ, acq, or serials are (or were) handled in real libraries. CS has
a fairly rich literature of the history of systems, but librarianship seems
not to.
For example, when I was a kid (that is, when I was 10, mid-1970s), the
local library used a checkout system that seemed to involve photographing
my card and the circ. cards for the books I was checking out, using a
specialized system embedded in the circ desk (can you tell I was fated to
be a librarian and that CS was just distraction?). While this is clearly
going to save the time of the reader during the checkout process, the
records management issues surrounding managing the images, checking items
in (which is less time-sensitive), and handling overdue items would
probably have been a bear.
</derail>
- David, delurking, to avoid the "back to school" workload
Ed Summers wrote:
On 9/4/07, Dan Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yes, lightweight, agile, blah blah... but if you're staring at code
without knowing what people want from the system, it seems that it
could be pretty frustrating. If you don't think that the problem
scenarios will be helpful in understanding the problem domain, it's
easy for me _not_ to write them :)
They are actually extremely helpful in understanding the problem domain, dbs++
If we had a similar story for other stakeholders (BC, etc?) I think
we'd be well situated to create a use case for ordering monographs in
Woodchip.
//Ed
--
David J. Fiander
Digital Services Librarian
