[Web4lib] OPAC hacks

[Bollinger,Stephen]

We created some custom search pages to try and improve the usability of our searches.  The forms use javascript to glom together a search string to send to the catalog.  They're primitive and they don't work as well as we'd like, but there a start at the problem at least.

http://opac.cadl.org/screens/search_books.html

They are format based (one form for books, another for movies, etc.) but the concept could be applied to create friendlier search pages in other applications.

Yours,
-Steve

Stephen Bollinger
Internet Specialist
CAPITAL AREA DISTRICT LIBRARY
401 South Capitol Avenue
Lansing, MI  48901-7919
http://www.cadl.org/

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org]On Behalf Of Andrew Darby
Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2005 12:01 PM
To: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: [Web4lib] OPAC hacks


I'd also be interested in hearing what sort of "OPAC hacks" people are
doing, not customizing the interface using the tools provided by the 
vendor, but either correcting something with, say, javascript, or 
extracting the information from the catalog and re-presenting it.

A couple of Voyager fer instances:

A number of libraries have painstakingly corrected issues with the
default searching, for instance, switching the keyword OR to a keyword
AND, removing the initial article from users' title search strings so it
doesn't conk out and provide an unhelpful bit of feedback ("the system
cannot interpret your statement"), etc. (Getty, UCLA, + more)

Here, i've been working on providing some contextual help when a search
fails (rather than the default purple "Your search resulted in no
hits!"), using javascript and the DOM.  (If you're interested, go to
http://traindb.ithaca.edu/ select "local catalog" and then try a failed
search (say, asdf) in keyword and then in journal title.  It's just
proof of concept; the help tips perhaps aren't so helpful, plus it looks
sort of gross.)

Also here, because the DVD browsing in Voyager is so painful, i made a
browsable list of DVDs
(http://www.ithacalibrary.com/collections/dvds.php).  This is based on a
monthly "report" from Voyager, that is then ported over to a MySQL
database; the U of Rochester has a much nicer implementation 
(http://www.library.rochester.edu/index.cfm?page=videos), that does
it automatically each night, I gather.

Then, there is the National Library of Sweden's catalog
(http://websok.libris.kb.se/websearch/form?lang=eng), which apparently
runs on Voyager, but some parallel universe Voyager where they care what 
the public interface looks like.  (Presumably, the National Library did 
this themselves.)

So what else is going on out there?

Andrew Darby
Web Services Librarian
Ithaca College Library
http://www.ithaca.edu/library/

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