a little bit of sorcer-y...

nah, not that type of sorcery -   i'm talking this type of sorcer(y)... our new(ish) web 2.0 catalogue 'experience'...

what does it do? this, from the developers (civica) website... "SORCER is focused at the library patron and, by using a range of Web 2.0 concepts and tools, provides them with a personalized exploration of a library collection integrating social networking and other new features."

in other words it's a more visual, informative, interactive and customizable online library catalogue... i'm in the process of 'learning sorcer' - how to create the containers to display information in various formats - browse clouds, gallery displays, browse lists, etc... doesn't sound too hard does it? but it's like learning a whole new language...

have you ever played around in the template html of your blog? maybe viewed the source code of a web page? because it's that source code that i have to work within when creating one type of container...  this is the source code of the sorcer graphic and first paragraph above - and it's this sort of code that i have to become familiar with... granted, the wheel has already been invented in that there are containers already made that i can copy, paste and edit - but i still have to scan it, work out what needs to be kept, what gets added where, what to get rid of, find the right graphic and then format it to fit, then add it's location into the right place in the code... and then there's the containers that require boolean searching - it needs to be done right to get the right sets of results... all this gets done in a test database and then has to be transferred to the live system - all very 'focused' and 'fiddly' stuff - for me it is anyway - not so for the younger generation who have grown up with computers - guess they grew up with computer-speak their second language...

it is interesting stuff though, but it's been doing my head in all weekend just thinking over what i learnt on friday - i don't want to forget it! the memory doesn't have the same retention and recall it once did (access to the test database from home would be sooo good - the only place where total concentration can really be achieved!)... 

i had ideas of writing a post on a totally different topic - i'd been mulling over a couple of reports of disturbing trends from earlier in the week - but, as you can see, it didn't quite work out that way - perhaps next week...