About the Website
The Library's website is an extensive collection of information spanning the breadth of services ICPL has to offer. We strive to make the website an online version of the Library, to provide what services are available online and any information that may be of use to the Iowa City and surrounding Johnson county community.
Technology
The site employs a "LAMP" solution, in that it runs on a Linux operating system, is served by Apache, stores data in a MySQL database, and is brought together and managed using the PHP scripting language.
Our Sites
We actually provide a collection of websites to the public, each with its own focus and interface. The main ICPL website is the hub of our online efforts and contains general information about the Library and the surrounding community. We serve our younger patrons through the ICPL Teens and KidSpace sites, both which have been tailored to their audience. Parents should find the Parents & Kids website useful as it provides access to the Children's Room information in a more mature format.
Our catalog is also currently presented as a separate site where patrons can access their Library card account and search our collections. We are aware of the many requests to combine the catalog with the main website, and options are being discussed on how to best support ICPL patrons with that in mind.
ICPL Event Manager
The online calendar is an application called phpEventManager. It is an open source event system originally based on the Meeting Room Booking System and WebCalendar applications, both also open source and released under the GPL.
We were unable to find an existing calendar system that completely fit our needs, so we began with those systems that came close and then extended the combined calendar application till it became the solution we needed. This is an ongoing project, and many additional features are planned but not yet implemented. phpEventManager is designed to be customizable to fit a wide variety of websites, and does support multiple languages and international date formatting.
phpEventManager is not yet available to the public, but we hope to have a full release completed soon. It will be released as a free product under the GPL.
Browsers and Standards
This site was designed with W3C and Section 508 standards in mind. Whenever possible, these standards were employed in the development ICPL websites--as long as the use of those technologies did not interfere with the accessibility and use of the websites by our patrons. We will continuously update ICPL websites to current standards as they become available and compatible. For best results, it is recommended that you use the ICPL website with a modern, standards-compliant browser, such as Mozilla Firefox or Apple Safari.
We have validated the code we use as XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS2. We are not currently using a DOCTYPE Definition with our pages because the specification does not allow the JavaScript scrolling effect we employ on some pages. The W3C CSS validation tool also does not yet support CSS3, and as a result will produce errors with the footer button transparency styles. The main body of the code does validate as intended with the above changes applied, and we provide the links in the footer as a general notification for those interested in the standards.
