Contributing

I’d love your help to make Library Map as accurate and useful as possible.

How to contribute your idea, bug report or improvement

1. Look at the current GitHub issues tagged help wanted to see if you can help. Most of these will be to do with updating data, like finding street addresses or other information.
2. You can create a new issue on GitHub.
3. You can send a pull request — though it is strongly preferred that you either ask to be assigned to an existing issue (so everyone knows you’re working on it), or create a new issue, first.
4. You can just send an email to librarymap@hugh.run and ask me to fix/add something.

If you have not used Git or GitHub before

There is a class outline for an introduction to Git and GitHub aimed at librarians at librarycarpentry.org. This assumes you are using the command line. If you create or already have a GitHub account, you can also edit files directly in the browser, or use GitHub Desktop - both of which are probably less intimidating options if you don’t have any desire to learn how to use a command line/shell interface, or just want to make a single minor update.

Which files to update

To update information about library services (e.g. fines info, loan period etc) you should edit website/data/library_services_information.csv.

To update information about library locations (e.g. street address, phone number, coordinates) you should edit the relevant csv location file:

• website/data/indigenous_knowledge_centre_locations.csv
• website/data/mechanics_institute_locations.csv
• website/data/nsla_library_locations.csv
• website/data/public_library_locations.csv

After your Pull Request is merged, a script will automatically merge data from website/data/library_services_information.csv into website/data/boundaries.topo.json. Please do not edit the topo.json file directly.

Citing and crediting data sources

If you are adding a lot of data and have a new source for it, make sure it is cited. You should update the list of sources at both sources.md and website/sources/index.html. If your source is “I just know because it’s my local library” or “I looked it up on their website” you don’t need to add that to the list of sources. If your source is “I found a PDF listing every public library on the State Library website”, you do.

Missing or inaccurate data

Currently we’re missing data for some library services in relation to standard loan periods and fines for overdue items. Any acurate and specific information about fines for South and Western Australia would be particularly helpful.

It’s likely that some library location data is inaccurate — especially for New South Wales. It’s also possible that the address data is wrong (even though the location shown may be correct), and in some cases it is missing.

It’s possible that some of the fines data for Queensland is a little off. This came from the State Library of Queensland but some of the data was wrong (e.g. Gold Coast Libraries does not charge overdue fines, but the SLQ report says it does).

I am particularly interested if you know of data sources for entire regions, states, or Australia — especially if they’re reliably kept up to date.

If you can fill in any of these blanks, please update the relevant CSV file and send a pull request. If your data is coming from somewhere in particular, you should also add that to sources.md in the relevant table.

Ideas for additional data

You might have an idea for library data that would be useful to map. I’m really happy to hear about these ideas! It’s possible that the information you want to map is unavailable, or just really hard to get, or maybe I will disagree that it’s useful. That’s ok - please ask anyway, especially if you know where to find the data.

Improvements to documentation

I’m always — always — happy to hear how I can improve documentation. Even better if you make the edit and then send a pull request.

Improvements to the website design, layout, or information

You might have an idea for an improvement that’s not about the data per se, but rather about the website. Maybe there’s some accessibility improvements I can make. Let me know!

Licensing and copyright

By contributing to this project you agree to license your work under the following licenses:

/website/data/*: CC-BY-SA

everything else: GPL-3.0-or-later