new version of the MyLibrary Perl module and scripts

[Eric Lease Morgan]

MyLibrary is a application designed for libraries allowing librarians to
define and create links to information resources, generate dynamic as well
as static pages from its underlying database, and it allows users to create
customizable views of the collection to create their own views of the
library -- a portal.

For more information, see:

  http://dewey.library.nd.edu/mylibrary/

A new version of the MyLibrary Perl module and scripts are now available.
This brings the distribution to version 2.60. New features in this release
include:

  PostgreSQL support

    The biggest change in this distribution is the ability to use
    PostgreSQL as the underlying database. Consquently, MyLibrary now
    supports two database foundations: MySQL and PostgreSQL. This
    gargantuian task was accomplished by the great work of Dobrica
    Pavlinusic who must have touched 25% of the code in order to get
    this working. Dobrica deserves a huge round of applause for this
    herculean effort. Because of the time and energy he spent, there
    is just a short hop to using other database applications such as
    Oracle or Ingres. "Thank you, Dobrica!!!"

  Better emailing

    Dobrica also helped make the backend emailing function more
    robust. It no longer hard codes a path to sendmail. Instead,
    emailing is handled by the Perl module Mail::Send. This also
    provide better cross-platform usage of the MyLibrary.pm.

  Better stylesheet support

    Based on impetus provided by John Creech better stylesheet
    support is now included. Using the MyLibrary administrative
    interface, it is possible to design a CSS file and have a link to
    that file specified in the free, user, and static templates. Thus
    stylesheet information successfully makes it to the end-user's
    browser.

  Searchability

    Using an indexer/search engine called Swish-e , it is now
    possible to provide a searchable interface to the content of the
    MyLibrary database. This is done by first reading the content of
    the MyLibary database with a script named mylibrary2swish.pl and
    piping it to swish-e. The search interface then provides a means
    query the index. The interface supports all the things librarians
    love including Boolean operations, nesting, right-hand
    truncation, and field searching. It also supports ranked output
    as well as output sorted by title. The great thing about Swish-e
    is that is is not really as much of an application as it is a
    library. Therefore it is really customizable. Swish-e is cool.

-- 
Eric Lease Morgan
Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture
University Libraries of Notre Dame

(574) 631-8604