This year's ELSUG (ExLibris Southcentral Users Group) conference was held at Midwestern State University in Midwest Falls, Texas. Two tracks throughout the conference were running better reports and how-to customize one's Tomcat OPAC interface. In order to maximize the number of sessions attended, a colleague and I divided the program and I attended mostly sessions on Tomcat.
Electronic copies of presentations have not yet been made available, but this should change in the near future. It is my understanding that the ExLibris site will be the home of the presentation files. In the meantime, if there is something you would like to know more about, let me know.
CSS and JavaScript Tips and Tricks for WebVoyage 7
Jim Robinson, Tarrant County College District
This session was a repackaging of a similar session presented at ELUNA with some updates. The content of the session easily made my conference registration worth it. As a disclaimer, I am not a programmer and nor do I play one on television. The good news is much of the work does not require a programmer, just someone with solid Web editing skills and a grounding in CSS with a passing knowledge of Java.
Tarrant County College District includes 5 libraries. The campus had undergone a Web redesign with an outside firm. The Tarrant County College Libraries decided to further customize the work by making the layout more intuitive and user friendly. Also, rather than leaving the catalog as a separate link with a different interface, the catalog and the library page became more unified with a single interface.
Tarrant County uses Tomcat for their OPAC search interface. Jim went into detail on how the various CSS files were altered and what defaults were changed to accomplish the look. Some of the customizations required a bit of Java, but Jim has made the code freely available.
Things altered:
- Location of quick search box
- Addition of social bookmarking tools
- Making the session timeout friendlier
- Collapsible/expandable contents notes
- Clickable breadcrumb links
- Add-on for Michael Doran's new books using Google book covers
- RSS picks that pull 5 recently added books from the new books file
- New sorting filters for branches and other locations
- Spell check (Did you mean ...?)
A persistent link is also available, but I could not determine whether this was a hack or already in Tomcat.
All code and instructions for the above changes can be found at: http://lib-serv.tccd.edu/code.
Basic tools mentioned during the session included:
- Firefox
- Firebug
- IE
- IE Developer Toolbar
- various code editors (BBEdit, File Merge for Mac OS X, UltraEdit, Beyond Compare, Notepad++, XML Spy, oXygen, EditiX, Cooktop, Komodo Edit).
Some of the tools are operating system specific, but some are not. Many are free too.
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