blyberg.net » Casey Bisson contributes to the XMLOPAC Class

iii-xmlopac-1.5.tar.gz

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I had a pleasant surprise this morning when I read that Casey had extended my XMLOPAC class. He’s written a function that takes a search term, then returns an array of bib-nums for that search. He’s hoping to create clustered search results, and his function may be a component of that. Yes, necessity is the mother of all invention.

Casey’s comment sums up why we go through the trouble to squeeze out every last bit of functionality from our OPAC, “Because problems are meant to be overcome.” I’d just like to see the odds stacked in our favor. Imagine what we could accomplish if our ILS actually enabled us to do this sort of work.

Thanks Casey!

I’ve incorporated his code into the class, with some minor changes. I also found another instance where III’s XML is malformed and added a fix for that. The complete package can be found here.

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4 Comments so far

That was quick. Just a note, though: the clustered search results prototype is live. Take a look here or at this this taggy version to play.

[…] Update: John updated the class to 1.5 and included this function. […]

You might be interested in this:
http://biblioteca.itesm.mx/agarza/recommender_demo/

Which is now running (as an internal prototype) under Firefox. The catalog is Millennium WebOpac. The algorithm is rather simple: show items that are nearby in LCC, ranked by “checkout activity”+”recentness”.

Getting Alternate ISBNs

I’ve added the following function to the version of the XMLOPAC class I use internally so that I can get alternate ISBNs using OCLC’s xISBN service.

public function get_altisbn($isbn) {
$xmlopacurl = ‘http://labs.oclc.org/xi…

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