Laura Melton's Portfolio
Technology Experience
I was enough of a geek before I came to the iSchool that I couldn't imagine a website that would be both feasible and impressive enough to count towards my portfolio. Instead, I took the opportunity to develop a couple of different scripting projects on KCLS' ILS, Dynix, using a query language called Recall, which will never be useful for anything else but was a great learning experience.
Scripted Reports
As I hinted on my service page, one of my jobs as an intern was to generate shelf-lists and other reports for branch staff who requested them. This was fine until one woman started requesting the same reports repeatedly. I didn't mind sending her the information she wanted, but I started to get a little bored of the identical task once every week or so. By this time I had learned how to batch Recall commands into script-like things called VOCs, so I automated these reports and made them available to the staff member for testing. At the beginning of November, once she was satisfied with the scripts and with my documentation, I made them available to staff throughout the system.
Also in connection with these reports, I developed a method of outputting the data in a comma-delimited format so that Excel could read and manipulate the file. Before this, I had to print the data to the screen and capture it by logging the screen output. Needless to say, the new format is much easier to work with and allows staff the facility to sort and reformat the data themselves. On the other hand, I am finding that Excel has its own quirks which cause staff to send me bewildered phone calls and email messages.
My reports have proven very popular, and I have received nothing but positive feedback about them. Unfortunately it is impossible to know how much use they are getting, but a lot of people have asked about them. Even better, staff have realized what kinds of data Recall can generate and have begun to ask me for more complex reports that are not covered by my simple scripts. The unplanned but beautiful effect is that I have automated the busywork and made my time and skill more available for giving people the information that they really need. After all, that is the purpose of library automation!
Book Alert
KCLS has a service called Book Alert which allows patrons to sign up for biweekly emails about new books in various categories. When I came to KCLS, Meg would spend a whole morning every other week on pulling the data for the report. At her request, I started working on automating the process so that she could just start it and let it work in the background while she did other things. It took me at least a couple of months, particularly because I spent weeks on one approach and nearly got it working before I realized that a better solution was staring me in the face.
The eventual solution was to pull the data with Recall and then to pass it off to a Perl script which would reformat everything into a file that's readable by the ColdFusion server whose task is to actually send out all the emails. I learned a little bit about the telnet protocol (from the first failed attempt), some about Recall, a good bit more about Perl, and a lot about making completely separate computer languages and scripts play together nicely. It was insanely frustrating, but I am just as insanely proud of my accomplishment.
In addition to streamlining the process, I managed to incorporate format information into my script's output, which was something that Meg wanted to do but hadn't quite figured out. Unfortunately the format information has not yet been incorporated into the email output, but that isn't up to me because I don't maintain that part of the scripting.
Not because I think they are readable, but for completeness' sake, here are the Recall script and the Perl script. (I think my Perl script is especially elegant.) Finally, I give you an example of the final output file from the beginning of March.