How much does a collecion of 2470 books weigh?

In 2003 LUU's old Science Fiction and Fantasy collapsed, its collection of books were put into storage and the room re-purposed. To summarise a long story, Pob told me about the books and I became their willing servant. In autumn 2006 we got access to the room the books were stored in, and we set about making an inventory of the books.

We had done inventories of the props cupboard over the summer and even with an order of magnetude less items, we found a spreadsheet a huge bottleneck as we wanted to uniquely number the items. It was my plan to run the library system on a linode so I thought I'd get the data exactly where I needed it so I abused phpMyAdmin and MySQL's AUTO INCREMENT so we were able to use all of the computers in the union's resource lounge, i think there was 8 of them, and I honed my skills as a slave driver to get the inventory done over two saturdays working midday until about 10pm.

And then I got ill and the rest of the year was written off.

At the same time Tim and I were running phpBB forums for both Sci-Fi and Fantasy Soc and LUU Rocksoc, and maintaining them was huge burden as the MOD system involves applying patch-like changes by hand. Tim had built a newsletter system and a calendar around a heavily MODded phpBB for Rocksoc and we were being asked to do the same for SciFi, and integrating a library system was in consideration, but we'd be polite to claim what was running then was a web of ugly hacks on top of an inflexible excuse for a forum.

I'd heard great things about Rails and was considering trying that as a way of actually doing something with Ruby, but that never materialised. It occured to me that building what I now know is a CMS would be too much work even if I was able to work full time on it using a language and framework I knew well.

Linux Format came to the rescue with a roundup of open source CMS software and I had a look at Drupal, mostly on the grounds that it appeared to have the best (only?) forum. With a few community written modules and a Zen based theme I was able to roll out a site that did everything SciFi had asked for.

Later that year Rocksoc had their site migrated to a drupal deployment complete with a zen based light-on-dark theme that looked enough like phpBB not to scare users away. The bulk of the work was done by 3 people in a single (long) afternoon.

There were a few problems along the way, a lot of my friends are fans of slashdot, nntp newsgroups and threaded conversations but it seems that most of our users don't think that way, and there have been repeated complaints that when followed up translate to "it's not broken like phpBB2", and it's a sad thing to realise just how attached users get to the most horrible of things, rejecting improvements on the grounds it's a little different. But we've had 2 years of a very fast spam free site, which is long enough to forget how much of a pain in the arse it is to have every conversation punctuated with adverts for dubious medicines.

Earlier today I rolled out the last part of the Grand Scheme, the Library was finally listed in Drupal. Its been in testing for ages and progressed at a rate of about half an hours work a fortnight, but thanks to CCK and some computed field magic, it's done. I feel like a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders. And right on time too, as the some shelving units are supposed to be arriving next week. There's still a lot of wish-list stuff I want to do, but importantly I know how to do it, and I'm over the molehill that became a mountain for me.

Now about that Drupal 6 upgrade...