“Finally, not to forget cataloguers, whose meticulous task is essential to the well-being of a library: why not wish for a not-too-far future, in which all documents (books, periodicals, records, videos, cdroms…) will include a standard self-descriptive computer-readable record in a MARC or XML format, and incorporated in the document by its publisher?”

(Michael Fingerhut, “The IRCAM Multimedia Library: a Digital Music Library”, in IEEE Forum on Research and Technology Advances in Digital Libraries (IEEE ADL’99), Baltimore, MD (USA), May 19-21, 1999, ISBN 0-7695-0219-9/99. Available online here: http://mediatheque.ircam.fr/articles/textes/Fingerhut99a/).

Never too late…

I had not seen your project before: it is very interesting and exciting. It looks as if we have adopted some of the same techniques (not to mention, javascript framework).

I will read over your project’s documentation - indeed it seems as if we could collaborate and settle on some best practices as well!

Thank you for your comment; I think these are good suggestions.

In fact I think Biblios should allow callbacks at all important events in the record life cycle: on retrieval from z3950 server, on record editing, on record saving (or “send”ing to a remote ils). This way plugins will have the opportunity to modify things as needed.

This also goes hand in hand with the concept of editor plugins, whereby someone could write an editor for another kind of metadata record, like MODS.

I’m happy that you keep working on Biblios and sharing some of your developer thoughts.

My work on a similar project during the last years makes me naturally interested in what you are doing now. I’m wondering if perhaps we could collaborate somehow…

Thanks and continue the good work.

A website for Biblios is basically complete; we’re just putting in place some final missing features before we release!

The University of Chicago is building a new library building, in part to avoid having to use off-site storage.