Villanova University’s Falvey Memorial Library has longed for a beautiful pig; however, we determined in early 2006 that pigs were only good at searching for truffles, so we decided to build our own OPAC.
After developing our own custom Digital Library from a Native XML Database, we quickly appreciated the ease of development with XQuery and XSLT. We then launched full speed ahead into the development of a new OPAC from scratch using XML technologies and MARCXML.
This presentation will describe the process of choosing an NXDB and optimizing it for large data set performance. Developing searches that take about 2 minutes to process and optimizing them down to about 2 seconds. I will also describe the development processes of the OPAC interface including the AJAX features we have implemented. I will share our success stories and our failures.
What has your repository done for you lately? The Rails-powered BibApp is the ultimate mashup of article databases, citation management software, and digital repositories. To date, it's helped us add over 2000 articles to our repository by organizing citations, identifying articles we can archive, and generating DSpace import packages. It also lets us analyze research produced on campus, illustrating popular research topics, departmental affiliations, and collaborative relationships between researchers.
Academic digital libraries face serious challenges in trying to adopt agile project management techniques. While there have always been significant differences between how an academic and a corporate team might solve a problem, today, digital library and corporate offerings are often in direct competition. Time-to-market is more important than ever before. This talk will identify the most troublesome characteristics of academic bureaucracies and make suggestions for working around these obstacles.
I will detail how you can create an OPAC with features comparable to Endeca or AquaBrowser's search products (faceted browsing, relevancy ranking, fuzzy searching) using the open-source Apache Solr search engine and your favorite web programming language. I will present a catalog with most of Endeca's features in 250 lines of code or less and discuss performance/scalability concerns and common pitfalls when using Solr.
Libraries in developing countries have difficulty implementing and supporting commercial ILS systems. Poor support for internationalized interfaces and expensive software licensing fees contribute to an increasingly unsupportable situation in libraries around the world. Electronic Information for Libraries (http://eIFL.net) is currently planning the development of "Library-in-a-Box," an open-source, fully internationalized integrated library system, designed to be easy to install and support, and with next-generation OPAC features like faceted browsing. Library-in-a-box will build on the work already done by evergreen and koha. This talk will discuss the current state and future plans of this project.
The Smart Subjects tool attempts to increase broader user discovery of relevant library resources by serendipitously recommending library subjects related to a user's search query. The prototype tool uses large locally created subject indexes consisting of rich topical keyword content harvested from local sources. An OpenSearch interface allows this recommendation service to be integrated flexibly and easily in a variety of web applications.
Princeton University has developed their current digital collections architecture around a native XML database and the XQuery programming language. This presentation will look at XQuery's strengths and weaknesses within the context of our current development environment as well as mention other environments in which an XQuery framework would (or, perhaps, wouldn't) work. What is XQuery? Why would one want to use it? Doesn't it do the same thing as XSLT? How does fulltext searching work within, or in conjunction with, XQuery? and Will XQuery be flexible enough to adjust to changes in our backend system? are all questions that will be posed and discussed.
Howard County Library (a public library system in Central Maryland) deployed an open source, Ubuntu-based system on nearly 300 computers in 6 locations.
nearly 300 computers offer customers the following:
word processing (Open Office)
web surfing (Opera and Firefox)
music and video (Real Player and MPlayer)
and communication or Instant Messaging (GAIM)
5-7 year old Dells computers
a vendor sent right from heaven (Open Sense Solutions)
willing and carefully educated front of house staff
open minded and empowered customers
and talented, talented, talented technical staff
$25.00 for software
$2000.00 for support
$25,000 in memory upgrades
The Atom Publishing Protocol is an HTTP based protocol for publishing and editing Web resources. It has direct relevance for libraries and archives that are increasingly interested in building repositories of content on the web. In this presentation I will cover why the protocol was created, how it is being developed, and how to build out and exercise a simple APP application.