Tag: horizon7

Curse you Superpatron!

It’s way past my bedtime, but the Ann Arbor Superpatron has been planting ideas in my head again…

Recently Checked Out Books feed (in RSS or otherwise)

I’ve not built a feed, but I have come up with these two representations of the most recent check outs (click for larger versions):
1) The last 30 covers to walk out the door…

2) Word Splat!…

…that particular splat is entitled “And Treacle Challenge Yorkshire” and is now on sale for only $395,000 (serious bidders only please!)
Word Splat! is made up of words from the titles of the most recent X number of check outs (where X is a roughly a handful).
I made a typo when initially coding the Word Splat!, and ended up with a random sub selection of words at the top left.  I kinda like that, so whatever you get at the top left (if anything) is officially the title of that Splat!
update…
I’ve added three more book collages:
1) 30 Overdue Books
2) 30 Most Recent Requests
3) 30 Most Borrowed Books
The “Overdue Books” are a random selection of items that were due back on the previous day, but have yet to turn up.

“Did You Mean?” – part 2

I’ve been keeping an eye on the search terms and suggestions over the last few days and I noticed that we’re getting quite a few people getting failed keyword searches simply because there’s nothing that matches the term.
In particular, we’ve got a lot of students searching for diuretics.  As there’s no matches found, the spell checker jumps in and suggests things like dietetics, natriuretic or diabetics.  That got me wondering if there was a way of generating suggestions relevant to diuretics, rather than words that look or sound like it.
As a prototype, I’ve modified the Perl script to query the Answers.com web site and parse the response.  The hyperlinks text is compared with known keywords in the subject index and a tag cloud is generated (click to view larger version):

I’ve named it “Serendipity” simply because I’ve no idea what’s going to appear in there — the suggested keywords might be relevant (Hypertension and Caffeine) or they may be too broad (Medicine) to be of use.
Continue reading ““Did You Mean?” – part 2″

HIP Tips!

Do your 856 URLs show up in a big font size that doesn’t seem to quite fit in with the rest of the text on the full bib page?
The quickest way to fix it is to fire up the Horizon table editor, select marc_map, and then locate the marc_map that you use for your 856 URLs.
In the “HTML format (Info Portal only)” field, insert class="smallAnchor" before the href. For example, if your HTML format looks like this:

<a href="$_">{<img src="$9">|$y|$_}</a>

…then change it to:

<a class="smallAnchor" href="$_">{<img src="$9">|$y|$_}</a>

Save the change, and then restart JBoss and the 856 links should pick up the formatting of the “smallAnchor” element from your HIP cascading style sheets (CSS).
And, for the more adventurous – if you’d like to know which 856 links your users are clicking on, then you can set your marc_map up to redirect to a CGI script that logs the URL and then redirects the user’s web browser to the true 856 link.
Once you’ve got your CGI script ready (in this case, I’ve called it logit.pl), you just need to change the 856 marc_map to link to the script – e.g.

<a href="http://foo.com/cgi/logit.pl?$_">{<img src="$9">|$y|$_}</a>

Once you’ve saved that and restarted JBoss, your 856 URLs look like this in HIP:

http://foo.com/cgi/logit.pl?http://www.ebooks.com/12345

Your CGI script just needs to take the contents of the QUERY_STRING environment variable (in the above, it’s http://www.ebooks.com/12345), append it to your log, and then issue a redirect to that URL.
(disclaimer: all of the above was done with Horizon 7.32 UK and HIP 3.04 – your mileage may vary depending on which versions you’ve got!)

Horizon “reconst” in Perl

Apologies to everyone who was interested in this for the delay in getting it posted!
The Horizon database stores several fields (e.g. title, author, etc) in the format “processed” / “reconst”, where the “processed” column contains the text stripped of punctuation and the indefinite/definite article, and “reconst” contains the stripped characters.
For example, the title “The great Aussie fashion : Australian fashion designers 1984-1985 /” is stored in Horizon as:

processed:
    great Aussie fashion Australian fashion designers 1984 1985
reconst:
    <M /7R-M: MThe

The “processed” version of the title is much more suitable for sorting than the original title.
Browsing through the Horizon mailing list archive, I came across a set of instructions for interpreting the “reconst” value.   As we generate a lot of custom HTML reports at Huddersfield, I decided to have a stab at coding the instructions in Perl:

reconstructTitle.txt

To use it in your own Perl script, just paste the subroutine in and call it with the “processed” and “reconst” strings, e.g.:

reconstructTitle( $processed, $reconst );

I’ve only used the code for reconstructing titles so far, but it might also work with author names, call number, etc.
The code is definitely “beta” and I’m not sure if it handles every “reconst” command yet, but feel free to make use of it.  If you can improve it, please do!