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annoying things about the los angeles public library online catalog
there are a few things that annoy me about the los angeles public library online catalog:
- it makes pointless use of sessions that time out after a very short period.
- it takes you through horrible little splash screens to implement those sessions.
- books are not indexed by isbn.
- the login is based on your many-digit library card number.
- it makes you log in frequently, despite the above-mentioned annoying sessions.
- it does not remember the library which you always/most-frequently have books sent to when you place them on hold.
- there's no way of saving a list of books to check out later without actually putting them on hold.
but most of all, it is annoying because i think i could do a better job and would have a tremendous amount of fun doing so. that is very frustrating. taxpayer-funded institutions should be required to provide their data in a way that is as raw as possible, and expose their interfaces, so that entrepreneurs can build better ways of accessing that data. all of the lapl data is locked within a piece of software for which they are almost certainly paying too much.
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actually, on their policy page, they claim the pages on the site "are designed and maintained by library staff". Jim, why not make a stab by sending them an email with your grievances and suggest they let you take a crack at it? The worst that could happen is they ignore your request. Or maybe the worst would be they accept your offer...
the online catalog is a piece of vertical software called carlweb from the library company. to be fair, it probably does all sorts of behind-the-scenes management stuff with an equally atrocious and limited user interface.
it would be nice if there were sufficient economic incentive for companies that make vertical applications to have the same sort of user focus as a company like amazon.
(and the worst the lapl could do is indeed recruit me to help. like i need another project.)
maintained by library staff???? hahahah! what a joke! no wonder the system sucks! staff is always = retards.
what a broad brush you wield. it's the system, not the people. innovation within a large organization (where large is anything more than a few dozen people) is extremely hard, and takes rather exceptional leadership (particularly if they have to lead from below, which is even more likely as the organization gets larger and older). it also takes a willingness to fail frequently, and people have an innate resistance to that even if it means failing on a grander scale less often.
in my experience, most of the time it's the upper management that's totally clueless and decides to make all the wrong decisions, usually for their own selfish interests.
I've actually spent some time looking into online library catalogs (aka OPACs, online public access catalogs) and they all really suck. Part of the problem is that the OPAC is only one part of the system: there's a bit that tracks what books they have and what they're ordering, there's the bit that tracks where the books are (on a branch-by-branch basis, or in the teen library, or the off-site archives, or being restacked, lost, etc), there's the bit that tracks patrons (who you are, what you've checked out, what you want to renew, what fines you have, etc.), there's the backend catalog interface used by the librarians, etc, etc.
Since these systems have so many intertangled parts, it's hard to swap one out without replacing the whole system. And that's a huge project, so you don't see that much incremental improvement. Also, we haven't really been allocating lots of tax dollars to libraries in recent months, so whatever $$ they get that can go to the computer system has been going to Internet kiosks and Web-enabling their older text-based terminals.
Finally, there are a whole host of other difficulties w/r/t OPAC that stem from their input data. Electronic book records pretty much all come from one company and follow a super-complex data format. While it's a standard, it doesn't link in with other standards. Therefore, you can't (easily) use a relational database to hold book data, so libraries have missed out on, for example, being able to switch to MySQL.
I've decided that this type of system is the perfect application for open source as libraries don't compete with each other and are willing to share source with others to build their systems. OTOH, it's a big PITA to get the initial stuff up and going, so what you really need is a set of major libraries (NYPL, Harvard, LOC, etc.) to give it a big push.
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problem is these kinds of institutions always award bids to moronic big 5-type consulting agencies.