[Koha] Idea for development - library floor plan on OPAC

[Darrell Ulm]

Agnes Rivers-Moore <arm at ...> writes:
> I would like to imagine a feature for Koha's OPAC, where the customer 
> can click on a 'Where is it?" button for any title that is available on 
> shelf, and be presented with a library plan showing the section where 
> the item should be.

Hello everyone, 

This is a project I have been working on in bits and pieces. I am still in the
process of making a decent (and fairly simple) interface for the staff. The
patron side is much easier. Progress is decent and with any luck I am *hoping*
to have time to get this done in a few months, but one never knows what new
projects are going to pop-up! It is not quite ready to upload to be worked on. 

I think the important thing is to allow different libraries different ways of
handling the maps. For us (and probably others) choosing a map for a location
(including range of call / location code / library branch) is done and then the
map can be annotated with an transparent overlay. In this way, one does not need
to make countless maps and change them all the time. The main library(or
libraries / floor / etc.) layout map can be used and then marked up for the
location of the collection. The "marked-up" part is a little tricky - but I am
looking for Jquery to rescue the situation.  

If the library did not want to use the overlay stuff, they could just upload
jpegs, pngs, flvs(why not?), or gifs (or anim-gifs as NEU did) but it could be
more work whenever things are moved around. And they do move!

With some neat JQuery on the patron side also for fancy display, the thing would
look pretty nice. This is a somewhat large scope project - mainly because of all
the different elements required to do it, and I am working away at it when I
have half a moment. 

 Darrell Ulm