How To: Donate Books to the Library
Skip the circulation desk. The librarian handles all that.
BTW, if they (the collection managers) think that a book is not "in-line" with the library's mission statement, it might end up in sales.
on e-SAILor
I have been volunteering in the Math/CS department office for a while, now. I noticed that, among other things, the Student Service Center employees spent most of their time doing a "grad check". When the office received a Degree Candicacy request, the employees keyed in the student's ID and traced the student's academic record in the SAILor database.
Dependency checking is something that a computer should be doing (and Kim Greenwood agreed). I boldly assumed that a prototype can be hacked out using makefiles. Or I can use Ant, if I later decide that [Tab]s are just unbearable... :p
After discussing the idea with Kim, she referred me to other people with more knowledge of the internals of Sailor. According to Kim, CSUH pays CalPoly of San Luis Obispo (SLO) to host Sailor. All the data is in SLO. If something happened to the communication lines between CSUH and CalPoly, e-Sailor would crash. Student's won't be able to register, etc...
But let's look on the bright side. I called CalPoly, and got to speak with a staff from their Enrollment Services. John, the staff, confirmed that Sailor and/or Power are homegrown software. And IT Services of CalPoly have the source. He also said that CSUH hacked/modified the Power source extensively, ending up with a possible fork of the code tree. But he also mentioned that Power and e-Sailor are just front-ends to a mainframe. So those Novell Terminals that I've been seeing are actually the more hard-core way of looking things... :P
Bad news: the CSU system (yes, the WHOLE 23 universities) purchased PeopleSoft software and will be deploying things within 2-3 years. John warned me that I might not want to spend my resources on something that is going away.
Well, at least if we (the CSU) are switching, we will still need a tool that can fetch data from SAIL mainframe. And that is something that I want to work with, at least for starters. If I can fetch data, I can do fun stuff with it, like do dependency checking. Also, I can make a plugin for Harshal's-proposed openBlackBoard.
We'll see.
