Re: [CODE4LIB] calibr: a simple opening hours calendar
Salvete! I second the policy suggestions about hours that were stated earlier. The simpler hours are kept, the better. I found myself in the position of having a Library with crazy hours due to budgetary and scheduling constraints. My low tech solution to that was to add the hours right on the back of the cards so folks would have that data handy. :D Cheers, Brooke
Re: [CODE4LIB] calibr: a simple opening hours calendar
I generally agree that hours have unnecessary complexities, I would also say that some of that is because libraries (at least, large, research academic libraries) are fairly complex organisms with *lots* of disparate services. I think it's more analogous to a shopping mall: the stores generally follow the same pattern, but the movie theater has different hours, as does the food court (and then the Chick-Fil-A diverges from that). Then there are office hours and the Sears tire department is different from other schedules or when Lens Crafters' optometrist is open, etc. Not to mention holiday hours (and Santa times, etc.). So this is hardly unique to libraries, or even an edge case, but it is unusual that we feel the need to consolidate it into a single interface. But, yes, it would help if we didn't have a million inconsistencies in similar service areas (again, the stores in the mall are all supposed to keep the same hours) to make it easier to deal with the outliers. -Ross. On Nov 28, 2013 5:54 AM, BWS Johnson abesottedphoe...@yahoo.com wrote: Salvete! I second the policy suggestions about hours that were stated earlier. The simpler hours are kept, the better. I found myself in the position of having a Library with crazy hours due to budgetary and scheduling constraints. My low tech solution to that was to add the hours right on the back of the cards so folks would have that data handy. :D Cheers, Brooke
Re: [CODE4LIB] calibr: a simple opening hours calendar
[If a library building is open for all but a few hours, but contains servers, it is bad practice for cleaning staff to shutoff building power when finishing their shifts. Not that this has ever happened, especially not at UNC] There are some generalizations in the data shown on your blog post that might be able to give even tighter results. It looks like many locations / services have opening hours that are related to other locations and services. In some cases, the relationship is necessary: if a physical service is provided from a location that is entirely contained within another location, then the hours for the first service must be contained within the hours for the host location. Multiple libraries of the same general class may have similar hours. Variations from normal hours may be driven by common factors; if the university closes at 3pm, all libraries may close at 3pm. Violations of expectations are usually highly salient e.g. changes from normal hours (unless one expects hours to change and they don't ). If a nonpublic computer is associated with catalog searches and views that predominantly relate to holdings in a few locations, the hours of those locations is probably salient. Showing opening hours for today/tomorrow when displaying records may be useful; showing opening hours for top locations for items shown on a search screen may also be useful. If location is a facet then this is an easy feature to add. Simon On Nov 27, 2013 9:25 AM, Sean Hannan shan...@jhu.edu 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 hugh.bar...@lincoln.ac.nz 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:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Bohyun Kim Sent: Wednesday, 27 November 2013 11:28 a.m. To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU 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 hugh.bar...@lincoln.ac.nz 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
Re: [CODE4LIB] calibr: a simple opening hours calendar
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 hugh.bar...@lincoln.ac.nz 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:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Bohyun Kim Sent: Wednesday, 27 November 2013 11:28 a.m. To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU 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 hugh.bar...@lincoln.ac.nz 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 P Please consider the environment before you print this email. The contents of this e-mail (including any attachments) may be confidential and/or subject to copyright. Any unauthorised use, distribution, or copying of the contents is expressly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please advise the sender by return e-mail or telephone and then delete this e-mail together with all attachments from your system.
Re: [CODE4LIB] calibr: a simple opening hours calendar
to clock out. I got them to designate one of the phones in the library computer lab as being allowed to call into the time clock system, so I could stop wasting so much time ... then they decided to just stop having staff over there. 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 hugh.bar...@lincoln.ac.nz 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:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Bohyun Kim Sent: Wednesday, 27 November 2013 11:28 a.m. To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU 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 hugh.bar...@lincoln.ac.nz 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 P Please consider the environment before you print this email. The contents of this e-mail (including any attachments) may be confidential and/or subject to copyright. Any unauthorised use, distribution, or copying of the contents is expressly prohibited
[CODE4LIB] calibr: a simple opening hours calendar
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 P Please consider the environment before you print this email. The contents of this e-mail (including any attachments) may be confidential and/or subject to copyright. Any unauthorised use, distribution, or copying of the contents is expressly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please advise the sender by return e-mail or telephone and then delete this e-mail together with all attachments from your system.
