SOPAC 2 released

John Blyberg released www.thesocialopac.net, a site that hosts downloads, instructions and forums for SOPAC2, the "social opac" platform that powers Darien Library, and runs on Drupal. It uses Sphinx for fast searching.

At first glance, the install procedure seems a bit lengthy! I guess I could come up with smaller startup instructions for a similar setup using the Millennium module and "just" Drupal, but then I would still have to narrate how to install all of the modules to really get some great functionality. I guess I'll just have to install it myself and see how it works.

Congratulations, John!

Video Tour of OPAC Discovery Layer Tools

The Disruptive Library Technology Jester posted (a while back!) the video for this presentation which demos OPACs from different libraries which are either: OPAC enhancements, OPAC wrappers or OPAC replacements.

It's a good watch.

http://dltj.org/article/discovery-layer-video-tour/

To me, some lessons are:

• for user tags to be useful in an OPAC, you need critical mass, or seed the catalog with tags from an external source (LibraryThing?)
  
• while there are a lot of similarities in the way the interfaces work, there are some things that *maybe* should be standardized; like the location of facets, labelling, etc. A research opportunity.
  
• If I had to pick an [open source] discovery layer from those presented, I'd have to say Scriblio; it just seems solid, everything looks dead simple and keeps you clicking. One thing I'd change is the facet layout, as they seem rather "mashed together"--whitespace to the rescue?
  

SOPAC 2.0: a discovery layer for every library?

John Blyberg (creator of AADL.org and now at Darien Library) posts about the new version of SOPAC-- a "Social Opac" discovery layer which, it seems, will be ILS-independent. SOPAC 1.0 works with III (or "Millennium") ILSs and Drupal, and apart from normal catalog searching, it adds features like tag clouds, reviews and more.

It seems to me that if SOPAC can have an abstraction layer so that you can plug in translators for different ILSs, it really opens the door to using all of the great modules we already have in Drupal and have the tools to "easily" build Library Catalogs Just The Way We Like.

This is our philosophy--and I guess John's--for picking Drupal: have a solid base (in code AND community) from which to build on, and... build!

I envy Darien Library, I'm sure they'll get a great new website to match their library =) Full steam ahead!

Drupal Millennium Module 1.4 released

This release mainly fixes some MARC import problems and adds a few new features.

You can try out our live implementation in PASTEUR, our thematic library oriented towards our Health, Chemistry and Biotechnology faculty and students. This site is also running Apache Solr for faceted search, a custom (not yet released) Millennium Authentication module and others.

From the project release page:

Fixes:

• Fixed [#263310]
  
• Fixes for [#253593]
  
• Holdings ajax call now locale-aware
  
• Fixed ids for coverimages; were incorrect if ISSN or ISBN inculded a dash.
  
• Added missing "real names" for MARC language codes (e.g.: eng => English)
  
• Cleanup of CSS file
  

New features:

• Added more placeholders for book jacket image call (title, author)
  
• Tries to get Call number from first item if not available in MARC bibliographic record
  
• Adds all biblio information to Drupal's fulltext index.
  
• [#260858] Added .pot file for translators
  

Changes:

• Dropped auto URL alias generation; should be handled by pathauto.module + biblio.module (see [#89038])
  

A million free covers from Library Thing

LibraryThing just opened access to around a million cover images uploaded by LT users; you can get to them just by signing up for an API key and grabbing them from a special URL.

Tim Spalding makes some disclaimers: Amazon has more and probably better cover images, and they impose no maximum limit. However Amazon requires you to backlink to them from each image. LT has no such limit, and in fact encourages you to locally store images in order to reduce load on LT's servers.

If you installed the Millennium Module for Drupal, you can take advantage of LT's cover images like this:

• Sign up to LibraryThing if you haven't done so already
• Get an API key from LT
• Put this URL into your Millennium module's settings, replacing KEY with your actual LT API key:
  
  http://covers.librarything.com/devkey/KEY/medium/isbn/!id
  
  It will look like this:
  
  

Drupal Millennium Module 1.3 released

The Millennium module for Drupal is now at version 1.3. It fixes a number of bugs (mainly with MARC import) and has some new features:

• added option to show Google Books links (thanks Tim Spalding!)
  
• now shows a direct link to "Place hold" for current item. It only shows if this is really possible, by contacting Millennium when the node is generated.
  
• provides a block which shows actions (comment, hold, favorites, etc) which normally show under the item. (This should probably go into another module, though, as it is not really Millennium-related!)

The Google Books links show like this. It only shows if the current item has a "Full view" or "Preview" available at Google Books.
The other nice feature is a more cosmetic one; I made a block to join all the actions that can be made on an item on a Drupal block, so you can more fully place and style it:
Now, the only link that's actually generated by the Millennium module is the "Place hold or request delivery" link; the others come from other modules (Add This Button, Views Bookmark, and the core Comment module).

Thanks to everyone contributing! See the project page for more info, or you can go see our live demo.

What to show when you have no book cover images?

Whipping up a new (test) face for our OPAC brings many things to the table: researching wanted functionality, usability in interface design, and of course--looking great. ("Look" impacts users' perception of site credibility and ease of use, here)

So, of course, trying to put cover images was a must. For our current OPAC, which we share amongst 30+ libraries, has lot of book covers, thanks to cover digitizing being done in several libraries. But, we don't have cover images for all books. Those books either didn't get the process done, or didn't have book jackets--just a plain-color hardcover.

So, our super-duper social-powered wall of books ends up looking like this:

...which is not super at all.

So, fishing around I found my answer: make book covers on the fly. Library Thing and Google Books are doing this, with different methods (it seems!)

Google Books' looks like this: [link]
and Library Thing's like this: [link]
So, how are these made?

• a background image with a blank cover. I'm thinking it would be cool if, say, a book from 1950 had a worn-out cover, a classic novel with a stylized cover, etc.
• overlaid text (html) with the title and author.

So my strategies will be:

1. keep digitizing or getting book covers from our vendors
2. add some code to provide blank-book images when we don't have a local image, and count views of books with no local image (so you can prioritize the first strategy).

The dirty tech aspects will be the subject of a future post =)

Creating a Multilingual OPAC

Do you have students that speak different languages (say spanish, german, english) visiting your Library? Do you offer an OPAC in different language? Do you do keep subject headings in different languages in your MARC records?

As we are trying to build a new OPAC based on Drupal, and our users are coming more and more from other countries, what should we do?

It turns out that as Drupal has some great functionality for multilingual content, as well as doing some of that for categories. You can set up "automatic" translation for certain phrases (you tell Drupal to, say, always translate the english phrase "Chemical Engineering" for the spanish equivalent "Ingeniería Química"), and it just goes and translates wherever there´s a complete phrase (and case-sensitive) match. This is one way to do it for categories.

Just porting MARC into Drupal nodes has a whole set of pros and cons; now, doing something like automatic (well, semi-automatic) translation MUST have some pros and cons... guess I'm about to find out =)

I'll keep you posted.

Drupal Millennium module screenshots

Below are pics of the admin portion of the module; for a live demo you can try our implementation at http://biblioteca.mty.itesm.mx/pasteur/en

These are the general settings for the Drupal Millennium module, from where you can jumpstart your Next-Generation Library Catalog =)





Here's where you can manually queue items for import:

Beta release of Millennium integration module

I am proud to announce the newest version of the Millennium integration module, which crawls a Millennium WebOpac and converts MARC into Biblio nodes, adds taxonomy terms, and can show holdings information in real-time.

Check it out here: http://drupal.org/project/millennium

For a demo, go to http://enlinea.mty.itesm.mx/