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!

Two more libraries to go Drupal

Via LibrarianInBlack.net

Two libraries, U of M's and San Jose Library pciked Drupal as their next platform for their library web pages.

U of M's blog post details how they compared between several options like Joomla, Drupal, Plone, Typo3 and others.

It would be nice to know if they mean to only host their information pages, or if they were planning on building something more (like some OPAC functionality, or A-Z lists of journals, etc.)

Yay! I contributed to core Drupal

Well, I only tested a patch for required field validation =) But still exiting!

Oh, by the way, this is part of the Drupal 5.10 security release... so scoot and go update your sites!

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:
  
  

Spelling suggestions in Drupal + Solr search

Apache Solr has the option to build a dictionary to suggest words to search for when a search returns zero hits. I suggested a patch to the Drupal Apache Solr module that adds support for that.

If you're running this module, please help try it!

You can see it live in our production site, PASTEUR.

Atiz Bookdrive DIY demo in an hour

Sales reps from Atiz installed this monster yesterday. Look at the size of it! We have a demo in a few... I hope to post my impressions afterward.

Stay tuned!

Nice Drupal theme: Marianelli

Marianelli is a nice configurable 3-column theme by Lioz. Try the live demo!

http://drupal.org/project/marinelli

Exploring faculty experiences with e-books: a focus group

An interesting read. Here's the article.

"In spring of 2007, Arizona State University Libraries held a focus group of selected faculty to discover their perceptions and use of electronic books (e-books) in their research and teaching."

Scanner for patrons in Alaska

The University of Alaska Anchorage
Consortium library in Anchorage Alaska
has a KIC II Scanner for users to scan directly into their USB drives or email. Nifty, eh?

Check out the stats page showing how patrons are using them at the vendor's site.

Via librarian.net