[WEB4LIB] Re: URL maintenance in WebPAC (Innopac)

[Darryl Friesen]

> How are you maintaining the integrity of your OPAC's links (if applicable,
> in the 856 field) to journal titles? (Btw, we're using Innopac's WebPAC.)

Right now, we're not.

> Sheryl Dwinell's comment hits the mark: "It would be nice if our catalog
> vendors could develop some methodology for checking links within the
> database rather than having up jump through all these hoops to do so."

Sure would.

One of the (future) projects on my list is URL validation.  I haven't started
yet so I can't really say how it's going to turn out, but my thinking so far
is to use something like Expect (on our Unix machine) to automate the process
of doing a create list of records with 856 fields, selecting some useful data
from that list, FTPing the results back to the unix machine, then having a
program (Perl script using the LWP modules) check the links and create a some
kind of status report.

As a somewhat related project, we're planning on building a database of
resources (local and remote databases, ejournals, pathfinders etc) from which
we can automate the generation of many of our current web pages.  For
resources such as E-Journals, I'd like to see the 856 in the catalog point not
to the actual resource, but to some intermediary "page" -- either a static
page generated from the above database, or a live database query (somewhat
similar in concept to a PURL, I guess, in that the URL in the 856 should never
have to change; all changes occur in the resource database).  This has the
added advantage of allowing us to provide additional information to our
patrons (like notes on the resource's coverage, information about vendor
restrictions, such as username/passwords, IP restrictions  etc) before they
get there.

As I said, neither of these projects are currently more than incoherent
scribbling on my white board.


- Darryl

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   Darryl Friesen, B.Sc., Programmer/Analyst    Darryl.Friesen at usask.ca
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