Coding Projects

Featured Collection Catalog

People tend to associate public libraries primarily with books. But libraries have increasingly begun to add new types of items to their collection in order to better serve their communities’ needs and wishes. For example, the library I formerly worked at offers camping supplies, ukuleles and binoculars (among many other unexpected things) for checkout.

The challenge, however, is ensuring patrons are aware of these items. Patrons know they can search the library catalog for book titles but if they don’t know what nontraditional offerings the library also carries, patrons won’t know to seek them out.

With this project, I wanted to provide a way for libraries to feature subsets of their collections to make these lesser-known items more discoverable in hopes of increasing their usage. Exploring this subject also gave me the opportunity to gain an understanding of some of the basic functionality of library catalog apps. [Learn more]

Book Club Kit Reservation System

Public libraries commonly bundle together multiple copies of the same book, along with a discussion guide, into kits targeted toward local book clubs. This type of offering doesn’t integrate well with existing library catalogs: When patrons put a hold on an item in the catalog, they’re put in a queue and have no control of when they’ll receive that item. This conflicts with book clubs’ needs, since they tend to follow set schedules for reading and discussing their chosen titles.

This project focused on creating an app that would allow public libraries to show book clubs what titles they offer as kits and allow people to reserve kits for specific periods up to a year in advance. This gave me a chance to learn about working with dates and dynamically generating data and updating an app’s state. [Learn more]