[Koha-devel] RFC: Koha Book Cover System

[Reed Wade]

Selecting and storing images locally for all holdings sounds like a pain.

I can imagine a cooperatively held db (hello, koha foundation) of
records that look like:

isbn/issn/other globally unique id that identifies the holding in a
way that makes searches possible
url to images (front, back, etc) - maybe they're on flickr, or in amazon land
image license and/or attribution statement
caching limits
who updated
when updated

And some simple REST style api that allowed a module to display the
attribution and use the image url directly for display or via a
(potentially caching) proxy for local library networks that might
require it.

And a mechanism for adding/updating records to the cooperatively held
db. And for automatically using them maybe based on who updated them
in case some folks turn out to be bad at it.

A variation -- instead the central db providing the look up service.
It could provide just the collective DB with your local koha instance
subscribing to updates. So, the user load of the lookup is local but
we get the benefit of sharing the effort of selecting images.
(Reinvention of usenet data flow architecture sort of.)

-reed




On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 5:24 AM, Kyle Hall <kyle.m.hall at gmail.com> wrote:
> Excellent ideas all around. I suppose it could be written as a CPAN
> module which would then be used in Koha.
>
> Kyle
>
> http://www.kylehall.info
> Information Technology
> Crawford County Federated Library System ( http://www.ccfls.org )
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 1:05 PM, Galen Charlton <gmcharlt at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 12:04 PM, Kyle Hall <kyle.m.hall at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> This new Covers module would be the sole interface for Koha for all
>>> cover systems ( Amazon, LibraryThing, Syndetics, etc. ) and would act
>>> as an interface between Koha and the book cover modules.
>>
>> Good idea.  It occurs to me that this could be *very* loosely coupled
>> to Koha and done as a component that could be used by other
>> applications, as all that it would need from Koha itself are some
>> configuration settings and some information from each bib record to
>> grab covers for.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Galen
>> --
>> Galen Charlton
>> gmcharlt at gmail.com
>>
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