Code on nostuff.org archive | Chris Keene

A play with the Talis Aspire API

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 19:35:39 +0000

I wanted to have a go with the Talis Aspire API and see what potential it had and how easy it was to use. Talis Aspire is a Reading List system with the key purposes being, firstly, a method to inform libraries which books and resources they need to buy, secondly, a unified way to access lists and content, especially as more and more stuff is online.

But the array of systems across a University delivering the online ‘student experience’ is staggering and often confusing, hence the need to to investigate ways of embedding data from one system (such as this) in to other systems. My end goal is to display a list on a webpage outside of the Aspire website.

MARC Tools & MARC::Record errors

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 12:17:59 +0000

I know next to nothing about MARC,though being a shambrarian I have to fight it sometimes. My knowledge is somewhat binary, absolutely nothing for most fields/subfields/tags but ‘fairly ok’ for the bits I’ve had to wrestle with.

[If you don’t know that MARC21 is an ageing bibliographic metadata standard, move on. This is not the blog post you’re looking for]

Recent encounters with MARC

Importing MARC files in to our Library System (~~Talis~~ Capita Alto), mainly for our e-journals (so users can search our catalogue and find a link to a journal if we subscribe to it online). Many of the MARC records were of poor quality and often did not even state the item was (a) a journal (b) online. Additionally Alto will only import if there is a 001 field, even though the first thing it does is move the 001 field to the 035 field and create its own. To handle these I used a very simple script to run through the MARC file – using MARC::Record – to add an 001/006/007 where required.
Setting up sabre – a web catalogue which searches the records of both the University of Sussex and the University of Brighton – we need to pre-process the MARC records to add extra fields, in particular a field to tell the software (vufind) which organisation the record was from.

Record problems

One of the issues was that not all the records from the University of Brighton were present in sabre. Where were they going missing? Were they being exported from the Brighton system? copied to the sabre server ok? Being output through the perl scritp? lost during the vufind import process?

To answer these questions I needed to see what was in the MARC files, the problem is that MARC is a binary format so you can’t just fire up vi to investigate. The first tool of the trade is a quick script using MARC::Record to convert a MARC file to text file. But this wasn’t getting to the bottom of it. This lead me to a few PC tools that were of use.

PC Tools

MarcEdit : Probably the best known PC application. It allows you to convert a MARC file to text, and contains an editor as well as a host of other tools. A good swiss army knife.

MARCView : Originally from Systems Planning and now provided by OCLC, I had not come across MARCView until recently. It allows you to browse and search through a file containing MARC records. Though the browsing element does not work on larger files.

VuFind in 8 minutes using Amazon EC2

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 13:02:24 +0000

I’ve created a screencast showing how easy it can be to install VuFind. Here I go from nothing (no server, no OS) to full VuFind install in under 8 minutes.

It would probably take less than two minutes (under 10mins in total) to add MARC records to the installation, but I didn’t have any to hand at the time.

This demo cheats a bit by using a script that does the heavy work, the script was a mash up I created taking existing scripts and commands that come with VuFind with a few tweaks. It probably would have been only slightly slow to run most commands manually.

Talis Aspire, checking if a course has a list

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:26:18 +0000

Talis Aspire is a new-ish Reading List system used at the University of Sussex Library.

On Aspire, a url for a Department looks like this:
http://liblists.sussex.ac.uk/departments/anthropology.html

A page for a course looks like this (for course l6061):
http://liblists.sussex.ac.uk/courses/l6061.html

The nice thing is that you can replace the ‘.html’ with .json or .rdf – while the html only has a link to the related list, the json and rdf expose other links and relationships, such as the department.

Dev8D

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 20:07:22 +0000

This isn’t a comprehensive review of dev8d, checkout the twitter stream (that link uses twapperkeeper by the way, the guy who created it was there and it was great talking to him), and wiki for and much else on the web for what went on.

ircount development

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:59:18 +0000

I’ve finally got around to spending a bit of time on the ircount code.

This post goes through some of the techy stuff behind it. If you’re just interested in features, I’m afraid there’s none yet, but you can now compare more than 4 repositories, but that’s as far as you’ll want to read.

ircount : Repository Record Statistics

Thu, 14 May 2009 19:34:53 +0000

I’ve updated Repository Record Statistics (which I refer to as ircount).

Some key points:

Repository names with non-standard characters were not displaying properly. They now should, though there are some parts of the site where I have not updated the code yet. Many Russian IRs are also not showing the correct name, even though it is correct in the database, which I will look in to.
If a repository changes its name (in ROAR) then the new name should be shown in ircount
When looking at the details for one Repository, you can now compare it with any other repository, not just those from the same country. You’ll see two drop down boxes, one for those from the same country (for convenience) and one listing all repositories.
I’ve removed the Full Text numbers, which only appeared for some repositories. They were inaccurate and not very useful.
There’s now a link on the homepage to ircount news (which is actually just posts on this blog which have been tagged ‘ircount’, like this one).

The code is now in a subversion (svn) repository, my first time using such a system, which should help me keep track of changes. I can make it available to others if anyone is interested.

short urls, perl and base64

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:56:20 +0000

One of my many many many faults is coming up with (in my blinkered eyes – good) ideas, thinking about them non-stop for 24hours, developing every little detail and aspect. Then spending a few hours doing some of the first things required. then getting bored and moving on to something else. Repeat ad nauseum.

Today’s brilliant plan (to take over the world)

Over the weekend it was ‘tinyurl.com’ services and specifically creating my own one.

SQL update: doing a find/replace on part of a field

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 11:10:07 +0000

SQL is one of those things I rarely use, and it’s normally the simple stuff, but doing anything a little more complex can be non-obvious. For example, I had a bunch of URLs where I just need to update a part of the URL, as we were moving some files on a website. I eventually found what I wanted within the comments to the MySQL UPDATE command documentation. (credit to Alex de Landgraaf on July 21 2004):