For some time now, I have been intrigued with the idea of easily creating a list of ordered books that have just been received in Acquisitions. People order books and they want to know when they're available. How do we do this easily? Sure, it would be great if my receiving them automatically generated a list that could somehow be broadcast, but so far that hasn't worked out.
Originally, my hope was to share list this with our patrons, but I realized that this was a bit too ambitious. The main obstacle is that there is further processing that must take place after the book leaves my desk, and so it's really difficult to inform patrons when the book is on the shelf unless they've put a hold on it. Furthermore, the library webpage already has a listing of recently acquired titles. Why compete with that?
My slightly less ambitious goal was to supply a list of received titles to my fellow librarians, so they can have a sense of when the books they've selected to be ordered have arrived. So far even this has proven elusive, because I was having difficulty getting our own library system to easily organize the data. But tonight (or really early this morning), I think I may have a found a solution: Zotero.
Zotero is an online citation management system that integrates directly into the browser. It can quickly store records based on ISBN entry, and those records are pulled from WorldCat, the same database I use to load my records, and one that I trust. Once these records are created, I can quickly create a bibliography and I could post this, perhaps here on this wiki where I have some permissions control. What's most important to me is that this be quick, largely a matter of cutting and pasting numbers quickly, and generating a bibliography in a few clicks. Zotero might just do it.
You can tell I'm still thinking this through and have yet to really try it, but I think I might be onto something.