We had a great time at the Drupal 4 Libraries Birds of a Feather gathering at DrupalCon Los Angeles. So many people participated that we had to find extra chairs in order to accommodate everyone. We had representation from a diverse range of interests. Many attendees were from academic libraries, but we also had individuals join from public libraries, and we had a few vendors who work with libraries in the room, as well. Following is a recap of the tools people mentioned during the discussion.
Digital Asset Management Systems
Digital asset management systems took up a good portion of the conversation. This discussion started with a question about good photo archiving solutions. It was suggested that, as long as the archive is not large, Drupal on its own ? with content types and views ? may be the best solution for the photo archives needed. It was also suggested, however, that Drupal is not necessarily scalable for large archives, or for storing original assets. This is where digital asset management systems come in.
The following DAMS were mentioned:
Events Management
The conversation about events management centered around two topics: reigstration for events, and room reservations or resource management.?
Events Registration
- Evanced Events Importer
- Entity Registration (also brought up for working with Evanced, and as a potentially better solution to Evanced Events Importer)
- Localist
- Flag (not events-specific, but can be implemented for events registration)
Resource Reservations/Management
- Resource Scheduler (UCLA)
- Room Reservations (MIT)
- Drupal Rooms (BlueSpark, will have a D8 version)
Crowdsourced Cataloging
The room was asked if anyone had tried any solutions for crowdsourced cataloging. In general, everyone felt that this should be heavily monitored. One resource was recommended as an example of what might be possible/what another group is doing:
Hours Management
The other topic that had a lot of interest was hours management. The following solutions were recommended:
- Opening Hours (Harvard, http://tischlibrary.tufts.edu)
- UCLA working on a project, looking at rooms as part of this, happy to talk with anyone interested
- LibCal
- NYPL has a custom module not yet released because working on the naming conventions