This webinar is about the Open Source software that is available to supplement your library system, regardless of whether you are using an Open Source Library System like Koha or Evergreen or a proprietary system like Millennium, CARL, or Horizon.
Software that dramatically extends and expands the capabilities of your library system software fall into two main categories: discovery interface and metasearch. While other products (e.g. content management systems) may integrate with your ILS to some degree, we will focus our attention on discovery and metasearch tools, how they work and who is using them.
1. Open Source ILS Add-ons Lori Bowen Ayre http:// galecia.com Infopeople Webinar 10/22/09
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4. The ILS needs to become a platform that supports appropriate interfaces for discovery and metasearch applications living on top of it instead of trying to do everything on its own.
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10. Libraries are beginning to develop their own tools for searching multiple data repositories with a single search box and to present understandable search results to their users
15. Allowing Customers to Add Reviews Can Be Dangerous “ This book was very thrilling and the ending took me by surprise when I've learned that Sirius Black was actually innocent and Ron Weasley's rat, Scabbers,was actually a servant of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Name. Voldmort dies in the 7th book.”
No single website is the sole focus of a user's attention. Increasingly people discover websites, or encounter content from them, in a variety of places. These may be network level services (Google, ...), or personal services (my RSS aggregator or 'webtop'), or services which allow me to traverse from personal to network (Delicious, LibraryThing, ...). — Lorcan Dempsey, “Discovery happens elsewhere” (http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001430.html)
Current APIs provided by vendors are limited (ask for ingredients to apple pie and get the whole pie or some key ingredients missing) Inconsistent implement of SIP Expense of SIP Slowness of Z39.50 Maybe NCIP2 will be better Screen-scraping - grab output intended for display to end user Not documented Not structured for convenient parsing Direct query access to database: most vendors don’t support it (or if they do, it costs extra) IF YOU HAVE AN OSLS… <other developments if you don’t have an OSLS>
New approach: move toward XML-based web services API model to enable developers outside of the library community to more easily access the information stored within the ILS. In 2007, the Digital Library Federation convened the ILS Discovery Interface Task Group (ILS-DI) Purpose: analyze issues involved in integrating integrated library systems (ILS's) and discovery applications create a technical proposal for accomplishing such integration. Initial recommendation of the group (&quot;revision 1.0&quot;) published in June 2008. <other technologies that are improving “discovery”>
OAI-PMH: OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting A way to take many different types of data formats, organized in different ways and make it findable/discoverable SOA service oriented architecture modular programs that perform a single, simple task (restaurant analogy) tasks are re-usable, recallable (call the busboy to clean the table) the presentation, business logic and computer logic are separate food on the plate / menu / recipe Example of web services is when the ILS communicates with Amazon’s API to pull reviews and book covers. This is an “application to application communication over the Internet.”
databases and catalogs use a variety of metadata schemas, indexes, and algorithms, and the metasearch engine must make often arbitrary decisions about how to aggregate, and order the search results. Source: http://www.extensiblecatalog.org/faq
An open source social discovery platform for bibliographic data. It provides a graphic integration between the catalog UI and the library's Drupal (CMS) site. Composed of three parts: SOPAC (UI), Locum (ILS connector), Insurge (data repository) Entire project licensed: GPL v.3
2.1 Enhancements - Multi-branch support - Incorporation of 3rd-party data into discovery index (Syndetics, Amazon, etc) - Destination login links within the catalog - &quot;X of Y copies&quot; availability in the hitlist and record view - Limit searches to available items - Links for downloadable items - Vacation holds (pause your holds) - Internationalization - Native support for diacritics
Blacklight uses Solr to index and search text and/or metadata, and it has a highly configurable Ruby on Rails front-end. Currently, Blacklight can index, search, and provide faceted browsing for MaRC records and EAD XML files, and support is planned for Dublin Core and MODS as well. Blacklight was originally developed at the University of Virginia Library and is made public under an Apache 2.0 license. As of version 2.2.0 (released June 8, 2009), Blacklight is distributed as an engines plugin and as a demo application that uses the engines plugin.
Right side allows searcher to limit by Facets behave like tag clouds: Subject Genre Place & Time Format (audiobook, book , e-resource journal, microform, video) Author Tags
Apache Lucene : a search engine library for indexing content Solr : a Lucene-based search server that includes facets PHP : a scripting language for Web development AJAX : techniques used to load data asynchronously (facets, availability) Other libraries involved in development: CARLI is working with the open source community to continue to develop and improve VuFind so that it will serve the unique needs of the consortial community, and serve libraries of all sizes within the CARLI I‑Share community and beyond. Discovery is an online search tool which is being developed by the Research and Development Services department of CSU Libraries.
WebVoyage (Voyager OPAC) at I-Share Libraries WebVoyage: shared catalog for CARLI – Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois Better suited for known-item searching More sophisticated, library-savvy searching Just added records immediately available in WebVoyage (VuFind finds items added as of 9pm the night before – new items are exported and reindexed for VuFind)
Just like WebVoyage, CARLI users can checked item availability and place requests Benefits of VuFind over WebVoyage -better for discovery and narrowing large searches -item level requests (avoids time outs that sometimes happen with WebVoyager) -links to Google Book Search for previews -more accessible (screen readers, etc) -better integration with SFX (URL linker)
Similar goals as VUFind and Blacklight, but XC incorporates a modular, standards-based architecture and integrates with a wider range of user interface platforms. Does NOT use metasearch: uses a series of services to collect metadata, normalize it into a common format, enhance existing relationships, refine it into FRBR levels, and then construct a single efficient interface that provides precise and comprehensive searches. Search performance and results ranking issues can now be overcome with the XC architecture. In addition to providing discovery tools (like VUFind and Blacklight), XC’s Metadata Services Toolkit provides services for metadata normalization Aggregation Enrichment Can use XC to prepare metadata for use in a variety of user environments, both commercial and open source. Can customize out-of-the-box user interface and add to functionality of your website. Offers a platform that fully integrates online catalog with library website.
The OAI Toolkit enables OAI-PMH harvestability of an existing repository (part of XC or standalone) is a server application written in Java only needed for ILS’s and other repositories that do not already have the ability to be act as OAI-PMH Repositories (OAI Servers) NCIP Toolkit acts as intermediary between NCIP clients and the ILS to provide real-time interaction with ILS client sends an NCIP request to the toolkit, the request is parsed and sent to the ILS using its proprietary interface response is then translated back into the NCIP protocol and returned to the client. XC user interface The XC Project plans to include NCIP toolkit drivers for a wide range of popular commercial and open-source integrated library systems.
A unique metasearch tool for a couple of reasons: Integrated OpenURL resolution Both a harvester/indexer and federated search tool Metadata driven knowledge-base Implements a 3-tier caching system Issues: Have no control over the response time of the remote query targets Working with targets so they allow better access to their servers or their data Better: XML gateway (instead of Z39.50) - optimally through harvesting via OAI-PMH). How to minimize slow response time on users: The 0.9.0 branch represents a different direction in the UI — in that the UI will be much more responsive to users, allow users to stop a query at any point and retrieve present results, see queries and search status, etc. search result caching - we use a tiered caching system to enable users who happen to enter a search that some other user had previously performed to take advantage of that fact of get their results quite quickly - by caching the results of the first instance of the search, we do not need to go out an query the remote targets again. Technology: Ruby on Rails – OS web framework provides easy, quick, flexible UI development MySQL Lucene (Ferret) web services (REST, SOAP/WSDL)
Works with SFX (and URL resolvers used by many libraries because SFX provides an XML representation of the request results. Innovative has no API support for its OpenURL component so would not work with LibraryFind. Uses the following protocols to harvest OAI or MARC formatted data: Z39.50 / SRU / SRW OAI-PMH OpenSearch SOAP / WSDL COinS
http://search2.library.oregonstate.edu
Passe-partout
Shared principles: free, transparent, high quality, collaborative, empowering, available to anyone who needs it