Tag: opacs

“There was enough left for this cowbell… Damn you, eBay!!!”

Okay, I’ve never seen any episodes of Saturday Night Live, so the recent spate of “more cowbell” posts went straight over my head (leaving a very unflattering centre parting).  Thank God for Wikipedia 😉
Anyway, never one to willingly miss a passing bandwagon, here’s my contribution…

white dog poo?

Sarah Houghton (aka LibrarianInBlack) has blogged that Answers.com has a new natural language “Web Answers” feature which lets you pose life’s great unanswerables – e.g.:

(I should point out that Sarah didn’t pose that exact question, but it’s one that’s been niggling at the back of my mind for years!)
After reverse engineering the new feature, it looks like they’re using Ajax and XML – e.g.:

Some of you will already know that we’ve been using Answers.com on our OPAC to provide serendipity keyword suggestions, so I’ll have a go incorporating the “Web Answers” output into those suggestions too.

OPAC keyword email alerts

One of the medical conditions I suffer from is the common “not-enough-hours-in-the-day-itus” — bits of software and new stuff gets prototyped or developed to the proof-of-concept stage, and then put to one side when something more important comes up.
This is something I originally coded in January 2006, briefly blogged about in mid February, then got slightly miffed when Hennepin County Library went live with something similar, and finally almost managed to forget all about it!
Anyway, I’ve dusted off the code and plugged it into ye olde OPACeth.  All I can do now is sit back and see if anyone will actually use it!
Continue reading “OPAC keyword email alerts”

The Two Towers and Faceted Browsing in the OPAC

…well, the first is definitely a tower but I’m not so sure about the other one. Not only that, but I should really have posted this entry over a month ago.
Anyway, to get to the point — on my birthday (at the start of June), Bryony and I went for a walk over to Hinchcliffe’s Farm Shop. En route, we got some great views of Victoria Tower, atop Castle Hill:


Here you can see the shadow cast by the tower on Google Maps:

The second tower we found (if that’s what it is) sticks out like a sore thumb — it’s in the middle of some nearby woods and we have no idea what it is or what it was used for. Here’s how it appears on Google Maps:

You can see from the shadow that it rises high above the tree tops. Here’s what it looks like from the base, looking up:

I suppose it could be a chimney, but there were no signs of holes or doors in the base of the structure — it just rises straight up from the ground. Maybe it’s a secret missile silo?
If you look at the Google Map, you’ll find there’s a former wool mill complex to the north. This is now home to the Yorkshire Technology & Office Park, which happens to be where View-Based Systems Ltd (VBS) is located.
VBS was set up by the late Dr Steven Pollitt — if you’ve never heard of Stephen, then you might want to track down the two Endeca patents on the USPTO site, as they both cite his pioneering research into faceted browsing which was carried out at the University of Huddersfield. You can see some of the history on the VBS web site.
One of my colleagues, Dr Amanda Tinker, worked closely with Steven and they both gave a presentation at the CILIP Umbrella 2003 event on this very day 3 years ago. In fact, had things gone to plan, then Huddersfield could have launched an OPAC with facetted browsing (based on Dewey) 3 or 4 years ago.
Sadly things didn’t go to plan, and facetted browsing wasn’t quite as cool back then as it is now. Whenever I look at North Carolina’s OPAC, I feel a mixture of envy tinged with dischuffedness† that Huddersfield didn’t get to launch a faceted OPAC several years ago and snatch all the fame, kudos, brownie points, and glory 😉
Anyway, facetted searching is a hot topic again in 2006 and I’m looking forward to a meeting on the 17th with Howard Lockwood of VBS to discuss a possible collaboration project. All I can say at the moment is “watch this space” 🙂
Still, none of this explains what the second tower is for. If you have any ideas, please feel free to post a comment!

† dischuffedness: noun

the state of not being chuffed about something

Getting HIP updates & add-ons via a HTTP proxy

A couple of years ago we wanted to try out the optional ADA Profile for HIP 3 but, try as I might, I could not get the add-on to download using the HIP admin pages.
After much pondering, I realised that it’s because our external firewall was blocking HIP from being able to connect to the SirsiDynix server to fetch the download. Even the servers in our DMZ need to be configured to use the university’s Squid HTTP proxy servers before they can get external web access.
Google soon came up with the answer on one of the JBoss discussion sites and here’s what you need to do for a Windows HIP 3 server (it should be a similar process for a Unix/Linux HIP 3 server):
1) locate the batch file that starts JBoss — firstly, find the directory you installed the Application Server into, then open the “jboss” folder, then the “bin” folder, and you should find a Windows Batch File named “run.bat”
2) make a safe backup of the “run.bat” file before you make any changes
3) right-click on the “run.bat” file and select the “edit” option — this should open the file for editing in Notepad
4) if you search through the file, you’ll find several lines that start with set JAVA_OPTS=
5) find the very last occurance, and insert the following two new line of text after it:

set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -Dhttp.proxyHost=12.34.56.78
set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -Dhttp.proxyPort=3128

…where “12.34.56.78” is the IP address of your HTTP proxy and “3128” is the port number.
For example, on our HIP 3.04 UK server that section of the file now looks like this:

rem Standard options
set JAVA_OPTS=-server -Xms384m -Xmx512m -DISO_8859_1=UTF-8 %JAVA_OPTS%
set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -Dhttp.proxyHost=161.112.231.22
set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -Dhttp.proxyPort=3128

Once you’ve added the settings for the proxy server, save the file and restart JBoss.
If all has gone well, then you should be able to fetch updates and add-ons using the HIP admin interface!
Or, if all has gone pear-shaped, then simply restore that safe backup of the file you made earlier!
It should be a similar process for Linux/Unix users — locate the script that starts JBoss, open it in Vi, and add the extra two lines to the script.

HIP XML Parser (v0.01)

This is some code that I’ve been meaning to make available for public consumption for weeks, but we’ve been up to our necks with our RFID tender at Huddersfield recently.
The basic idea is to convert the XML output of HIP 2 and HIP 3 into a Perl data structure, which you can then use to repurpose your bib data and searches for other uses (e.g. to provide an OpenSearch interface).
The first chunk of code I’m making available provides a function (parseBib) that will convert the XML from a full bib page into a data structure.  Given the v0.01, you should treat this as alpha code at best!
http://www.daveyp.com/files/stuff/xmlparser/bib.pl
The above Perl script also contains some code to fetch the XML (using LWP) and will also dump (using Data::Dumper) the resulting Perl data structure to an output text file (dump_output.txt).  I’ve also uploaded the code as a CGI file that you can run to display the Data::Dumper output – e.g.:
Building an object-oriented database system : the story of O2 /
Just to get you started, here’s some further info…
Continue reading “HIP XML Parser (v0.01)”

Live OPAC search terms display

Another shameless hack inspired by the “Making Visible the Invisible” at SPL.
I’ve tweaked HIP to cache keyword search terms and then put together a couple of pages that display successful searches (in tasteful shades of purple and lilac) and failed searches (in gruesome greens). 
IE has a nice CSS blur, so I’ve coupled that with Ajax to provide a constantly updating web page where new terms appear at the front and then drop slowly to the back, becoming more and more blurred and darker as they recede (click to view full size versions):