Here’s a lovely little hack for displaying the contact details of our 5 libraries, neatly in a web page:
It uses Alex Bilbie‘s implementation of a geolocation/IP-lookup script to try and determine the nearest library to the person viewing the page, according to the following rules:
- If you’re on campus, then choose the library for that campus.
- If you’re within 20 miles of one of our three campus libraries (Riseholme, Hull, or Holbeach) then choose the nearest library.
- If you’re actually inside Chad Varah House, choose the Theology Reading Room.
- If none of these rules apply, choose the main GCW University Library.
We’ll be tweaking these ‘library lookup’ rules to get the best results. I’d also like to look at overriding the geo-lookup settings for logged-in users (displaying instead the library for their campus of study as derived from their profile). And what about displaying information about SCONUL Access libraries for distance learners, perhaps making use of Owen Stephens’ SCONUL libraries lookup script?
The page then uses the jQuery ‘accordion‘ widget to display the contact details for the chosen library, in a nice expandable format (i.e. you can click on the headings to display the details for a different library). It all degrades gracefully for browsers with less-than-impeccable support for JavaScript.
Neat, no? The code is on Github if you want to have a look.
Nice idea. It seems to think that Skellingthorpe is closer to Hull, than it is to Lincoln or Riseholme though!
Just a thought. Is it taking the location data from my Horizon record – which still has my old Hull address! (And yes, I have asked for it to be updated. About ten times now!)
Hi Julian,
The off campus location lookups are very approximate because of how they are calculated.
On campus location lookups will be much more accurate from tomorrow because we’ve now got better IP ranges for every building and campus.
Alex