Though Basecamp is an excellent use of Ruby on Rails, its interesting design choices can make it difficult for tracking code at the issue level.
My brilliant new colleague, Mark Matienzo, pushed to hack something together. So in a lunch hour, we did.
Labs Code (for want of a better name) uses the Drupal project and project [...]
A college friend (and fellow English major) was new to his public library, and wanted help finding some books. He’d just gotten his library card, and now it was time to use the catalog.
First step: he marched up to the computer, and entered the title and author together. No love. Then I told him how [...]
I’ve been thinking that Firefox is coming close to offering what Cameron Barrett predicted in 2000, an actual application platform.
I recommend three Firefox add-ons: LibX for searching the library, Zotero for organizing, and Scribefire for writing.
As Firefox 3 nears midnight release for Download Day, I’ve updated the NYPL LibX toolbar for compatibility. Let me [...]
Although he’s been too modest to mention it here, Josh’s first book comes out this month from MIT Press. Entitled From Betamax to Blockbuster, it charts the history of the video store, the dueling formats that made it work, and the inevitable consolidation that changed a conversation point into a commodity.
The introduction is available [...]
As bloggers inside the library started to write, it became obvious that the backend powering all that writing needed to become more scalable. Drupal proved to be a good choice to power a collective view of curators, branch librarians, reference librarians, map librarians, and others as they turn their work inside out through writing.
The prototype for the selected historical audio programs is coming along—it brings up some interesting notions about embedded metadata living alongside curated and created annotations. Watch the labs for a live site as it becomes available. Anyone have best practices with audio to share?
The holy grail of the unified user interface has driven many things, from Z39.50 to Google’s familiar search box paradigm. But the sometimes unremarked upon and ubiquitous interface improvement online in the past ten years is: Comments.
Comments let users see that a human is behind the interface. Comments allow people to intuit whether their problem [...]
Ever wanted an easier way to search the library? The NYPL is a vast array of linked nodes, and the various systems that connect the collections are sometimes complicated to make sense of. Kiera Manikoff dropped a suggestion in our box about using terms users recognize–so we did.
To help with your quest, we used [...]
At a presentation last week, Nicole Engard got a good laugh when she declaimed that “Email is for old people.”
Perhaps it is.
So to broaden our communication with the outside world, we’ve set up a del.icio.us account as nyplabs so you can see what we’re thinking about, and what links are arriving in our email that [...]
