I've recently come into a bit of a windfall, and I thought I might try to find a way to share it a bit more widely, and this is what I came up with. I'll pass along all of the ideas that I hear about. If anyone wants to pick up one of the ideas to implement it, please feel free. -pate ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2003 15:45:41 -0500 From: Asim Jalis <asimjalis@acm.org> To: Pat Eyler <pate@eylerfamily.org> Subject: Re: SPUG: windfall -> contest On Thu, Jan 02, 2003 at 01:27:32PM -0500, Pat Eyler wrote:

I write the occasional book review. Recently, I asked for a copy of 'LDAP Programming, Integration, and Management' by Manning Press and was a bit suprised when they shipped me a couple of copies. I asked them what to do with the other one, and they said I should find someone in SPUG that would write a review of it and pass the extra copy along.

Since I figure there are likely to be a few people that would like a free book, I thought I'd put together a quick contest to see who gets the free copy. I also manage the Koha project (a free software library system), so I thought I'd tie libraries, LDAP, and maybe even Perl into the contest.

If you'd like to review this book, please send me an idea for using LDAP within a library system (Patron authentication is already a work in progress). You don't need to actaully implement your idea, but the idea should be clearly defined so that someone can sit down and implement it in Perl for Koha.

Hello Pat, I am not terribly familiar with Koha but let me try anyway. 1. LDAP could be used to determine how to contact a patron when a book they recalled was checked in or when books they had checked out became overdue or in response to other events. For example you could contact the patron using phone, page, e-mail, internet messenger, SMS. The library user could set his preferences and these could be stored in LDAP. The user might prefer to get different kinds of notifications in different ways. She/he might prefer some over SMS and others over e-mail for example. Parents might wish to be notified by e-mail when their children checked out books. 2. LDAP is optimized for "read many, write few" while databases are usually optimized for writing. LDAP could be used to store the static attributes of the books which are unlikely to change. The checkout information and other changing state information could be stored in a database. The title, author, keywords, etc. of the books could be stored in LDAP. 3. The library staff directory could be stored on LDAP. This could include names, contact information, and possibly even pictures. A front-end in Perl could access LDAP and make this information available over the web. Those are my suggestions. And yes, I would be interested in writing a review of the book. I also had a more general question. How did you get started writing reviews for technical books? Did you just write to publishers and offer your services? I am interested in doing this also and was wondering how to break into this field. Thanks. Asim