Wild on Books Part 2

Wild on Books - Day Two

Having responded to the email from yesterday that contained the podcast, I have now had another from my friendly librarian;

NO HURRY! I was just wondering if it is 'physically' (electronically?) possible so we could think about giving it a go. What do you think about next term? We don't have to have 160 books - we could reduce to 5 copies of 10 - 12 titles 'released' into the wilds of the school Library, with focus on Yrs 9 & 10.
Thanks for being so positive,

Background One of the problems we have is getting students to read books, our school has a goal that each student should get 2.4 books out throughout the year. we have approx 1800 students, half boys, and half girls. The boys get out less books than girls. The Library doesn't issue really until half way through term one when they get their ID cards, and stop issuing 5 weeks out from the end of school due to stock take and to make sure all the books issued that year have been returned. We have more than 10,000 in the library.

So each year we try to get over 4,320 books issued to students to meet the goal, a normal week we may have between 100 and 200 books, through the 7 weeks of the reading competition we had around 350 and over 400 books taken out. I think we had over 2,000 books taken out in that period.

This "books in the wild" might help as well, it gets students using the Internet for something other than playing games as well as helping our schools reading and writing level.

Plan and Design
Some things to think about when designing the database
We need to record or have a record of each student, these can be exported from our Student Management System, why not have them set a password and username, well the students don't have email accounts to be able to have there forgotten password emailed back to them, I have thought about using Active Directory, but don't really have the access to the main school web server. We will use one of the Servers that I have setup at the school, will probably setup one of the ict servers with this, it does need to have a bit of grunt behind it, as there may be up to 30 students accessing it at once, maybe more. I will use there login codes that they have at the moment, and the password as there date of birth DD/MM/YY.

Next is looking at the books that we will be using, what details should be available for the students, if they enter a code the book should come up, or does this need to be there? Or should this be a double check to make sure that the student has found the right book?

Students registering the book?
Students entering the information once logged in, (log out?) code of the book, details of the book? I think I need to be able to access the Waitakere system (Books in the Wild) for more of this information?

Student Table
StudentID Number this could be associated with there school id - unique identifier
Surname
FirstName
SchoolLevel
FormClass
Username? This is not needed as they will login using there stduent ID Number 4 digit number. This means the students need to have their ID card present with them, even to get a book out.
Password = Date of Birth, too difficult to link in with active directory.
Ethnicity = for statistical purposes?
Gender = for statistical purposes?

Books
Barcode -unique identifier
SpecialCode mix of alpha and numeric characters
Title
Author
Description
ImageLocation

Entry
EntryNumber ID
StudentID
Books.SpecialCode
Excitement score
Date and Time Issued

Photo Idea, setup an email address for students to email there photo to...

Design of the site, it has to be interesting and grab the students attention. Should it be a book? Or simple pages? Multimedia? Images? Somethings to think about for my next blog entry.