Authenticating Drupal users against III / Millennium

The Millenium (III) Integration module for Drupal now has a VERY experimental module that uses screen-scraping to allow authenticating users against an III system using their library credentials (barcode/ID, last name and PIN).

This is done using a bit of screenscraping and using the "usual" Drupal API hooks.

The neat side of doing this is you could, in theory:

• [optionally] share your currently loaned items with other users or publicly
  
• receive custom alerts while navigating within the Drupal site ("you owe the library $$")
  
• when looking at an item imported via Millennium module for Drupal, see a message informing this item is one you currently have/is overdue, etc.
  
• let users make some/all of their loaned items public (in profile? RSS? etc)
  
• Mash up any of the previous with other Drupal modules (imagine "Your Friend checked out this book, and rated it ****", or "Subscribe to your friend's checkout feeds", etc.)
  

Here's a screenshot of how this shows under the /user Drupal path:

Now, of course this is teh fragile, using screenscraping and stuff. Current options are: (1) $hell out for Patron API module for III, (2) use SIP (which still requires a module), or (3) keep at this;

How can YOU help? If you have an III system at your command, you could provide me with a temporary login to test against.

Ideas to improve Drupa 7's admin usability

I posted some ideas on how to improve administrative usability in Drupal. Care to comment?

Some Possible Drupal 7 Enhancements 3apr09

View more presentations from janusman.

Article on Drupal and RDF

A great article that simplifies what the fuss over RDF/RDFa is about, and how Drupal is trying to tie into it.

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-cms/rdfa-drupal-and-a-practical-semantic-web-004149.php

Thanks @robertDouglass!

HILCC module for Drupal

In our Drupal sites for our library and now in our Knowledge Hub we've been using LCC to catalog items and then using HILCC to produce a navigatable architecture in our Drupal sites.

This functionality is now available to the public at large as a Drupal module, which you can download here:

http://drupal.org/project/hilcc

HILCC is a hierarchic classification scheme developed originally at Columbia University Libraries, designed to offer library catalogs a way to easily cluster similar-subject items for navigation. HILCC is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC license.

For now it's only available for Drupal 5, but a D6 version is in the works.

LOC (re-)releasing Subject Headings and more

Karen coyle mentioned LC is bringing back subject headings and other information (some originally available in the now-defunct lcsh.info).

More info is available in http://id.loc.gov/

What this means, is that at last some of LC's controlled vocabularies will be available to build the semantic web.

Intersection of IA and Librarianship

James Kalbach wrote this piece which, although not its main focus, talks about the intersection of Information Architecture and Librarianship.

Read "IA, Therefore I Am" by James Kalbach.

Auto-tag your content with Calais for Drupal

This is rebooting my interest in automated classification. =)

Check out the Calais Drupal module, based on the Calais service from Thomson-Reuters.

The Calais modules for Drupal (found at http://drupal.org/project/opencalais) are feature-rich, highly intuitive and designed to make it easy for Drupal users to automatically metatag their content, generating rich Semantic metadata that can be shared via a simple key and integrated into the larger content universe.

The screencast shows what an implementation would look like. I'm ready to use Drupal's RSS aggregator or FeedAPI module to pull in some content and see how Calais auto-tagging would work.

Of course, now I want to see what Calais does to library items imported into Drupal, see how Drupal would expose RDF and other stuff!

Disabling Etags from affecting your YSlow score

YSlow is a great tool to quickly determine what optimizations can make your site quicker. However, Yahoo determined to include checking for ETags; if the server in question has ETags enabled, YSlow scores will be negatively affected. This should really not always be true, as ETags aren't always "bad"; if your site runs from a single server, having ETags enabled helps.

Looking for an explanation for this, I came across a comment from David C-L inside the Yahoo Developer's Blog:

• Type about:config in the Firefox address bar.
  
• look for the setting named extensions.firebug.yslow.pointsEtags and set it to 0. If the setting doesn't exist, you can create it by right-clicking and choosing "Add".
  

Now Firebug will not ignore the ETags setting on servers to determine the YSlow score.

Why implement federated search tools you hate?

In my case, I of course don't *hate* federated search engines, I just think some could be MUCH better (that's why I wrote a PHP layer on top of III's Metafind years ago before actually rolling it out to users).

In "Why Reference and Instruction Librarians Hate Federated Searching", the author points out a bunch of shortcomings of these tools, but mid-article reveals the reason:

Given the above, why are federated search products still on the market, and why are libraries still contracting with vendors? What has changed my own mind in the last five years, transforming me from a reluctant community college reference librarian fighting it tooth and nail to a web librarian petitioning the university’s budget priorities committee for extra funds to pay for it? Two things: usability testing and developments in federated search products themselves.

It goes on to mention new features, new attitudes, and the real-world impact of simply exposing all this quality information we have tucked away in our many, many subscription databases: trying to simplify our present too many interfaces, paths, requirements, dead ends, and opportunities for confusion.

Oh! Also, Don't forget to check out http://federatedsearchblog.com/

Userfly: hosted screen recording for usability testing

UserFly touts itself as a tool to do usability studies by just adding a line of javascript to your pages. In reality, it is a screen recording tool that stores the actions your users did in real time.

The recording works, although since the pages seem to be captured from the Userfly servers and then overlayed with actions from the browser, you will find that if the user is already logged in, Userfly might not playback actions on those pages correctly.

The service seems like it's still in an experimental stage. IMO it still needs some polishing (the demo video is narrated by someone with a cold), and personally adding the javascript to one of my sites really slowed down page loading.

To be honest I would need more testing to judge if it works or not. I love the idea of just adding the javascript and getting instant recordings of site visitors.


userfly.com from Chris Estreich on Vimeo.

On a side note, a full usability test consists of more than just going by screen recordings of users, just make sure you read up on the subject before actually embarking on a testing spree "just" with this tool =)