Talis Aspire, checking if a course has a list

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.

For us, most (but not all) courses only have one list. URLs for lists are not predictable in the same way as the courses URL. E.g.
http://liblists.sussex.ac.uk/lists/EEC1E2AA-C350-DAFC-BDE4-1E9EF5EC69E5.html

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ircount development

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. Continue reading