Some of you may have seen a few links that appeared on the homepage a few weeks ago to see the real time occupancy of both the Mary Idema Pew and Steelcase libraries. If you, like most people, looked at them on a phone, you might have been a little confused and thought you were having a stroke. You weren’t. Once again a vendor was selling us a product from 2003 at 2020 prices.
Anyway, Patrick and I spent a few weeks in email with their support team, and we finally got access to the data in real time. So of course first I had to build a new system that could take their data and make it usable. Then I built a widget that could go in the CMS. So now, you can go to the library homepage or the “Visiting the Libraries Safely” page and see the current occupancy of each building, right on the page.
I’ll still make a stand alone page, but I need to wrap a few other things up before the semester starts. For now, you can direct folks to the homepage to see how busy the library is.