linking remote results w/local holdings... and some PHP

[Fernando Gómez]

Hello.

I am just experimenting with the following project: develop an interface
which allows patrons or staff to perform a search in a (web based)
abstracting database, and, before displaying the results, highlight in some
way those results which correspond to journals available in our library. It
involves a bit of HTML parsing, and a good dosis of luck, as it is not
guaranteed that matches will be always correctly found. But in any case, it
seems to be a worthwhile addition to a library OPAC (even if you have to
alert about its fallibility) because in many situations it could save
patrons a double search.

Now, the tools. I am inclined to do this with PHP; it has several functions
to fetch a remote page and treat it essentially as an array or a string. My
problem right now is that things like fopen("remote file") are working only
with some sites, and not with many others (including the one I intend to
work with!). So a bit of PHP expertise regarding these issues would be
appreciatted. I am developing under Windows ME + Apache 2.0.36.

Also, I would like to know if anyone has worked in a similar project, and
what experiences you would like to share. Maybe there are also some
copyright issues around here?

Thanks in advance.

Best regards,

Fernando J. Gómez

Biblioteca Dr. Antonio Monteiro
Instituto de Matemática de Bahía Blanca
Universidad Nacional del Sur / CONICET
Bahía Blanca
Argentina