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Amen to this! I suspect DIALOG is still being taught to believe it or not... "By the way, this looks like an awesome survey class. The headaches it would have saved me if someone had covered this stuff 10 years ago when I was in school, instead of teaching me how to search DIALOG!" --- Bohyun Kim, MA, MSLIS Digital Access Librarian [log in to unmask] 305-348-1471 Medical Library, College of Medicine Florida International University http://medlib.fiu.edu http://medlib.fiu.edu/m (Mobile) ________________________________________ From: Code for Libraries [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Joseph Montibello [[log in to unmask]] Sent: Friday, August 03, 2012 10:56 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Recommendations for a teaching OPAC? Hi, When you talk about the OPAC, do you want them to be working with a full ILS or really just the front-end piece? If it's just the patron-facing search, you could probably do worse than to install Blacklight. It probably doesn't really meet the "simple" criteria - there's a lot more to it than I could talk about. But getting it out of the box, turned on, and searching against a few records is something that you and students could probably manage. I've got a year of unix/ssh/command line experience and with a bit of mucking about, googling, and asking for help I was able to get a local (non-production) instance up and running, so it's definitely easy enough. By the way, this looks like an awesome survey class. The headaches it would have saved me if someone had covered this stuff 10 years ago when I was in school, instead of teaching me how to search DIALOG! Joe Montibello, MLIS Library Systems Manager Dartmouth College Library 603.646.9394 [log in to unmask] On 8/2/12 1:54 PM, "David E Mussulman" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >Hi everyone, > >I teach an intro to IT survey class for the LIS school at Illinois. The >one-major-topic-a-week syllabus doesn't really give us time to deep dive >into IT topics, but it lets us explore them and give contextual >understanding to the building block pieces. Ideally, every topic has >some sort of hands-on exercise that gives real life experience with the >concepts/technologies. The exercises are usually independent, but I've >been kicking around the idea of using a simple OSS OPAC to teach >different elements of the class as a semester-long big cascading lesson. >Examples: > >Lesson: Linux, ssh and the command shell >Exercise: Installing Ubuntu, getting comfortable with that environment > >Lesson: OSS and software ecosystems >Exercise: Get a LAMP stack setup on the OS, install the OPAC > >Lesson: Interfaces, usability, accessibility >Exercise: Use the OPAC, populate it with some data, assess its usability > >Lesson: HTML/CSS >Exercise: Use CSS to skin the OPAC, customize the HTML for your "site" > >Lesson: Data management, search, IR >Exercise: See if we can peak under the hood about how the OPAC's search >works > >Lesson: Interfaces to data: databases, XML, SQL >Exercise: Use the OPAC as an living example to work with those interfaces > >Lesson: Cloud computing, 2.0/social network integration >Exercise: Not sure yet... > >This idea primarily came from trying to get some simple XML/SQL >exercises that didn't suck (the setup for these environments is almost >as involved as any exercises itself), and the fact the previous classes >really liked dissecting the nextgen catalogs we've explored from a >software selection and 2.0 integration perspective. > >But here's the catch, and this is why I need your experience, Code4Lib. >I'm not an OPAC admin, and have no experience running or hacking them. >I'm looking for recommendations for software that would help me with the >goals above, without being too difficult or overwhelming for the >students or me. :) It doesn't have to be a good/complete OPAC, >necessarily -- just a teaching tool to give experience with the lessons >above. > >Should I be looking at koha and evergreen and the big ones, or are there >small projects that you're aware of that might be better? My preference >would be MySQL and PHP, but as long as the supplemental tools and >documentation are good, I'm flexible. For example, if there are tools as >good as phpmyadmin to browse postgresql, I don't think it really >matters. I'm willing to sacrifice "good" for "simple and transparent". I >don't think Rails is a good place to go with this because I don't want >to teach MVC/Rails. (Maybe I'm wrong?) > >Oh, and I'd also like a small project with great documentation, but I've >been around OSS long enough to know that's a diamond in the rough. >Sadly, the reality is (for most of these exercises) if the project >documentation is lacking, I'll have to write that as well. > >What are your thoughts on this endeavor? Any recommendations? Thanks! > >Dave > >PS. This is not a job ad posting. ;) >