On February 21, when you access the library’s catalogue and your account online, you will see the following improvements

• Book covers and reviews for many items
• Receive email notification about holds and overdue material, if you have provided library staff with your email address. After February 21, contact your branch or call Answerline (416-393-7131) and provide us with your email address, if you wish to take advantage of this new service.
• Ability to suspend your holds request for a period of time – eg. do not fill this hold between July 10 and August 1. Your place in the holds queue is maintained but you are not called if you come to the top of the list between July 10 and August 1. After August 1 your hold becomes active again and you will be called when the item is available.
• Ability to change the pick-up location for unfilled hold requests.

Toronto Public Library > About the Library > Website Redesign

I can’t wait to see the new interface!

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When I blogged about my totally small-school library reminder script, Claudine recommended Library Elf, which helps people manage their library loans. I hopped over and set weekly reminders to go out on Sunday, just before my Monday book runs. I just got my first reminder e-mail from them, and I am impressed. C’mon. Look at that screenshot. It tells me when books are due and when my holds expire. If I hover over the links, I can see which books they are. The lists of holds ready for pickup and books that are checked out are sorted by date, which makes perfect sense. I can add W-‘s library card and track his books as well. =)

Awesome awesome awesome.

W- and I borrow lots of books from the library. This script helps keep order in the house by reminding us when either of us have books that are due. I’ve removed our information from it and have made no efforts to make it user-friendly. Perl geeking required.

opac-reminder.txt

(It’s really a .pl. Can’t be bothered to mess around with forcing content type at 1:10 AM…)

Here’s the one that generates the RSS file that’s pulled into the right sidebar of my blog:

opac2rss.txt

Enjoy!

We exercised by running to the library. Running with a full backpack
of books turned out to be interesting—and tiring! It was good to
exercise, though. I look forward to doing that again tomorrow,
although maybe to somewhere else.

Random Emacs symbol: insert-monthly-bahai-diary-entry – Command: Insert a monthly diary entry for the day of the Baha’i month corresponding

You know what I’d like? An easy way to keep track of the topics I’m
reading about, and a way to visualize that over time. LibraryThing or
some other Amazon-hooked services wouldn’t be a bad way to get the
data in. Then it’s just a matter of looking up the category. I can
also keep track of links between books and people, and also links
between books and other books.

First things first: find an unobtrusive way to get the data into the
system. I’ll need it datestamped and indexed by ISBN. Ideally, I’d
have this just automatically hooked into my library checkout page, but
I haven’t checked if they’ve embedded ISBNs into the checkout list. If
not, I can enter them in manually, although numbers are a bit of a
pain to type accurately.

Hmmm…

Random Emacs symbol: floor* – Function: Return a list of the floor of X and the fractional part of X.

Did you know that the Toronto Public Library is the largest in North Americ in terms of circulation, with 19 million circulated items? (Source: Wikipedia) *Shiver.* What luck!

Random Emacs symbol: delete-other-frames – Command: Delete all frames except FRAME.

I'm going on another reading spree, this time on relationship
marketing.

At some point in time, I will be annoyed enough to write a non-(mouse
and pageload)-intensive way to say “Request all selected books and
have them delivered to my nearest branch.”

Argh. Little inefficiencies like that annoy me. That is so getting
hacked. Probably during CASCON, even.

Random Emacs symbol: Info-edit – Command: Edit the contents of this
Info node.