Need HELP! Working on library catalog for a small non-profit...

Posted by kbates2706 on May 19, 2009 at 7:21pm

Hello!
This is my pathetic drupal newbie post. I have very little programming experience, and I am considering Drupal for a project. I work for a non-profit that supports people with vision loss- so I think Drupal could be great because it is accessible inherently (to screen readers etc)! I need to build a catalog of the books in this small library so that people can use it to look up what we have and perhaps put a book on hold etc. The foundation I am working with already has a great website- so I need to figure out where to start and if drupal will work best to create the catalog I need within the current site they have...

Basically- I don't know where to start and feel like all the stuff I have been reading has been still too technical for me. Would Drupal work for this? I feel like some of the modules I have been reading about would be great, so I hope so!

Thanks!

Comments

Check out the documentation

Posted by ambientdrup on May 19, 2009 at 9:10pm

Check out the handbooks on this site here:

http://drupal.org/handbooks/

Also, the "USING DRUPAL" book published by O'Reilly is a great introduction to Drupal:

http://www.usingdrupal.com/

The new "Front End Drupal" book is also great for beginners.

For a library catalog I'd definitely use CCK, Taxonomy and Views - to get started ... so focus on learning those modules.

-backdrifting

See this other discussion

Posted by janusman on June 15, 2009 at 3:45am

http://drupal.org/node/417276

And also check out these modules:

http://drupal.org/project/createfromweb
http://drupal.org/project/library
http://drupal.org/project/millennium (I made it) =)
http://drupal.org/project/hilcc (ditto)
http://drupal.org/project/bookpost
http://drupal.org/project/amazon

And for search, use the apachesolr module.

I built something similar...

Posted by pastorjayrich on July 26, 2009 at 2:27am

I used the following modules to build a simple and powerful library:
CCK (To create a content type called "Library Item") http://drupal.org/project/cck
Views (Used to display content by Subject, Author, etc) http://drupal.org/project/views
Taxonomy (Core)(For subject and keyword searching. I also allowed free-tagging)
Library (with patron linked to user accounts) http://drupal.org/project/library
Create from web (To automatically populate content) http://drupal.org/project/createfromweb
Trigger (Core)(To email our office when something was checked out online)
Actions (Core)(To email our office when something was checked out online)

That's it and it works great!

Jason
www.amentcreative.com