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.

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.