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[1] Past code4lib talks have covered specific project management strategies, such as Agile, for application development. I will be focusing on and discussing general project management practices in relation to various library technology projects, many of which these strategies include in their own structures.
== Implementing RFID in an Academic Library ==
* Scott Bacon, Coastal Carolina University, sbacon AT coastal DOT edu
Coastal Carolina University’s Kimbel Library recently implemented RFID to increase security, provide better inventory control over library materials and enable do-it-yourself patron services such as self checkout.
I’ll give a quick overview of RFID and the components involved and then will talk about how our library utilized the technology. It takes a lot of research, time, money and not too little resourcefulness to make your library RFID-ready. I’ll show how we developed our project timeline, how we assessed and evaluated vendors and how we navigated the bid process. I’ll also talk about hardware and software installation, configuration and troubleshooting and will discuss our book and media collection encoding process.
We encountered myriad issues with our vendor, the hardware and the software. Would we do it all over again? Should your library consider RFID? Caveats abound...
== Coding an Academic Library Intranet in Drupal: Now We're Getting Organizized... ==
* Scott Bacon, Coastal Carolina University, sbacon AT coastal DOT edu
The Kimbel Library Intranet is coded in Drupal 7, and was created to increase staff communication and store documentation. This presentation will contain an overview of our intranet project, including the modules we used, implementation issues, and possible directions in future development phases. I won’t forget to talk about the slew of tasty development issues we faced, including dealing with our university IT department, user buy-in, site navigation, user roles, project management, training and mobile modules (or the lack thereof). And some other fun (mostly) true anecdotes will surely be shared.
The main functions of Phase I of this project were to increase communication across departments and committees, facilitate project management and revise the library's shared drive. Another important function of this first phase was to host mission-critical documentation such as strategic goals, policies and procedures. Phase II of this project will focus on porting employee tasks into the centralized intranet environment. This development phase, which aims to replicate and automate the bulk of staff workflows within a content management system, will be a huge undertaking.
We chose Drupal as our intranet platform because of its extensibility, flexibility and community support. We are also moving our entire library web presence to Drupal in 2013 and will be soliciting any advice on which modules to use/avoid and which third-party services to wrangle into the Drupal environment. Should we use Drupal as the back-end to our entire Web presence? Why or why not?
[[Category:Code4Lib2013]]
