Digital Bookplates :: Database Structure and Code
2/23/2008

There are two streams in the Digital Bookplates application.

1) Endowments
There are currently 378 endowed funds; over 350 have digital bookplates.  The purpose of converting 
from paper to digital was to save processing and handling time and also to simplify reporting 
requirements.  In our annual stewardship letter we now send a link to the donor's digital bookplate 
site.  The site displays the five most recently purchased titles and provides a link to a catalog 
search for all associated titles (divided into fiscal year segments) purchased on the fund.  

Titles are assigned to funds at the end of each fiscal year using endowment income, fund codes, call 
numbers, keywords, and other attributes. The lists produced are imported into a MySQL database which 
forms the basis for pulling the titles which appear on the bookplate site and in an RSS feed of 
random selections. 
 
2) Cash Gifts, Gifts in kind
Soon after the digital bookplates project for endowments was launched, there was demand for digital 
bookplates for cash gifts, new collections, and important occasions. A new stream, "honorees", was 
created to accommodate this demand.  At the same time, there was a desire to move away from paper 
bookplating altogether, a practice which had continued for most gifts and special collections. The 
work in the endowments path was done by a team from Integrated Technology Services and the Office 
of the University Librarian; as general bookplating is done in Technical Services, new workflows had 
to be devised. It was determined that entering titles and record numbers in the bookplates admin 
interface so that a representative sample would appear on the bookplate page would too time-consuming; 
a link to a catalog search was deemed sufficient.  Because this made the bookplates page appear 
sparse, we have written a screen scraper that grabs the first 5 titles on the search results screeen 
and displays them in the bookplates interface.


DATABASE TABLES (MySQL):

 endowments 
 items
 fiscal_years 
 income_endowments
 refs_endowments
 themes_endowments  

 honorees
 items_honorees [Because we screen-scrape, this table is no longer in much use.] 
 refs_honorees 
 
 refs 

 themes 


FILE STRUCTURE:
The Library is moving to a PEAR package templating structure - HTML_TEMPLATE_ITX
This is implemented in the public display pages only (except for the index page). PHP code files (fund.php) 
are separate from the identically named HTML rendering pages (fund.tpl).  Pages in the admin directory 
currently still have PHP and HTML interwoven in a single file.
	
bookplates/
	index.php
	fund.php
	honoree.php
	browse.php
	search.php
	theme.php
	viewall.php

	templates/
		fund.tpl
		honoree.tpl
		browse.tpl
		search.tpl
		theme.tpl
		viewall.tpl

	images/

	admin/
		index.php
		newfund.php
		edit.php
		newhonoree.php
		edit_honoree.php