Where here to code, dammit.

 
Howdie All:

I've got two projects for our group that we can get started on quite soon. And better yet, those working on them may be able to get some financial compensation!

The first is a project for the SLA Student Group. The group received a grant for $500 from the Illinois chapter to move the SLA Connections program to an online database. The grant gives you a little bit of an idea of what they had in mind, and once Aleksandra gets back in town, she can fill us in on more. (Here's an early presentation explaining the vision for the database.) As you'll see for the grant, they originally planned on having a former SLA officer use ColdFusion to develop this database and host it on the Illinois Fire Service Institute server, but that plan didn't work out, and Aleksandra is fully behind us doing it instead, using PHP and MySQL. We hope GSLIS will be able to provide server space to SLA for this.

The second project is a database of subscription lists for 19th-century Russian journals. The head of the Slavic library, Miranda Remnek, created this as part of her history dissertation research. A description and methodology and the current interface to the database are available online at Minnesota, where Miranda used to work. She wants to have the database moved to Illinois, where it will be hosted by the Library Systems Office, improve its functionality, and fix some glitches in the interface.

A student employee at Minnesota developed the database in PHP and MySQL. The Library Systems Office supports PHP but not MySQL: they have instead standardized on Microsoft SQL Server. We should only have to tweak the code a bit to get it to work on that.

I'm working with the systems office to get space on the Library server for this project, and in the first week in June I'll get a more detailed description of the database, which may help us in working with it.

I won't be able to make the meeting on May 31 (as Chad knows), but it should give everyone a good opportunity to get oriented, so to speak.

Kevin
posted by Kevin Hawkins at 2:14 PM