Brainstorming possible SPLOTs

SPLOT session

The idea of a SPLOT (shamelessly stolen from splot.ca) is the "smallest possible library online tool." Which is to say a single purposes, easy to use, web-based, fire and forget, no-login-necessary utility that helps make librarians (or possibly library patrons) lives easier.

Below is the results of the brainstorming in the code4lbBC breakoutsession.

- web hex code picker

- accessibility colour selector

- marcedit already provides a ton of marc functionality but isn't web-based, simple

- stable link validator - feed in url and check if it will work next time (or if it contains session specifc stuff)

- holdings checker - journal webpage to check whether the dates of publications you have available are actually available

- overdrive does not provide a report of titles that have expired; web-front end to Dan's headless crawler

- for patrons in academic libraries - assignment generator

- list of tasks; scheduler at end of term, certain time period, circulation - e.g. a way to create a repeated list of tasks and then schedule them in an irregular way, i.e. "at the end of each term," or "2 weeks before the start of classes"

- pastebin, gist - way to easily share text blobs; can set expiry dates

- how do I know when a librarian is available? check availability?

- z39.50 tester?

- library status dashboard? things patrons and staff typically look for?

- APA reference validator; tells you what to do to fix a reference (one for multiple references style)

- excel file with a bunch of orders, LC sort (subject, author, year) (apparently a plugin for marcedit that can dd this); csv file

- image/slide generator

I wasn't at the breakout, but I'd like to offer a couple:

- a tool for exporting utf8-encoded CSV data out of Excel (e.g., upload an Excel file, get a proper utf8-encoded CSV back). Excel is ubiquitous but it is useless for this purpose; current best practice is "use LibreOffice instead", which unfortunately is not practical in many shops.

- a web form that removes line breaks from text pasted into it.

Both of these tools would be of use to library staff doing digitization work, probably other types of work too.