Digital Initiatives

Backup catalog a la Google style

Voyager is scheduled for an upgrade on January 5 & 6th during which time the online catalog will be down. To help users search our collection during this upgrade, we created a new backup catalog. Please try it out - backup catalog . There are several notable differences and I will summarize some highlights here.

Search: There is a single search box with no explicit options to indicate the type of search, a la Google style.  The system searches only title and author fields for each search and displays the results according to relevancy as defined by the database engine (Mysql). It uses "and" for multiple words, respects phrase searching when double quotes are used and the order of search terms does not matter. No need to use lastname, firstname syntax for an author search or no need to consciously skip articles in front when doing title search.

Data: We got a data extract from voyager on December 23 and information about new books added to voyager after Dec 23 will not be reflected in this backup version. For each record, we only extracted part of the information (title, author, call number, location, status) to keep the display simple for the end user.

Technical architecture: The beta catalog was built using mysql and php. We are using mysql's fulltext search option to create search index. The database has close to 2.3 million records.

This is an experimental backup catalog which was designed just to fill the gap for voyager upgrade. As such it has limited functionality compared to a full blown voyager catalog or new 2.0 library catalogs out there. The links pointing to voyager catalog will be automatically redirected to this new backup catalog on January 5th and will be in place till the Voyager upgrade finishes. Any questions or comments are welcome. 

Who or what is big oscar, and should I be afraid?

Big oscar is a subdomain at AOL, specifically:

http://big.oscar.aol.com/

We make use of a small service offered by AOL, namely, the ability to toggle images for our chat application based on the status of our AOL login. When a page loads that uses this functionality, such as:

http://www.lib.k-state.edu/reference/vref/

or any of our catalog search pages where one finds a Meebo chat widget (or, more accurately, a picture of one), before the image of the chat widget loads, a little query goes out to big oscar, who either says, yes, the library account is logged in, in which case the "click to chat with a librarian" image loads, or no, which loads the "no one available" image. This is completely benign, and in no way poses a security risk.

Why bring this up? If a person uses Internet Explorer and cranks their security settings way up high, IE will flash a warning when this query gets sent to big oscar. Personally, I don't want to use a browser that's such a namby pamby about this kind of stuff (which is why I use Firefox, which applies a lot of common sense security fixes without being so annoying), but some people have been burned or otherwise convinced they need ultra-high security on their machine. Not much we can do there other than tell them to allow it.

Improvements to new books feeds

Harish rolled some changes to the new books script into production today. The fixes included:

• allowing the DVD and CD feeds to pick up items shelved in Hale
• random CDs and DVDs should no longer appear in subject feeds

Now that these feeds are really maturing and proving to be reliable, we want subject librarians to get the word out to faculty that they can have their own custom feeds. Currently, only one faculty member on campus uses a custom feed, and that's my wife. She loves it, and there's no reason to think others couldn't benefit from such a feed, too.

Adding a location limit to Voyager

This is done in SysAdmin - System - Location Limit Groups. I added the Leisure Collection by clicking on new, giving it a name, a display text (taken from the display name seen in the catalog, of course), and then added the location code on the second tab. That's it. Just reload a catalog session and there it is.

Voyager: print and email location names

There was a bug in Unicode Voyager that made the location names in email and print output from the OPAC disappear. Normally, this appears in the emailh.cfg or saveh.cfg file as:

Location:
     1000

Where 1000 is shorthand for Voyager to pick up the location name from a table. The only fix for this in Unicode was to replace this with:

Location:
     852 XX ab

so that at least the crytpic location code would appear in the output. They fixed this in v5.

StaffCat

We now have a 60 minute timeout version of the catalog for staff use:

https://staffcat.lib.ksu.edu

Two things to know:

• It's identical to catalog.lib.ksu.edu other than the extended timeout. If you see evidence to the contrary, let Dale know and he'll fix it.
• Not really for public consumption, but, hey, if they find the URL (because I just blogged it), it's not really the end of civilization as we know it.

Voyager keyword overlay

Problem: the native keyword search in Voyager's WebVoyage catalog forces the user to use an explicit Boolean (i.e.- they must type and, or, or not between all search terms) or the search returns a "cannot interpret search" error.

OPAC changes

I made a host of changes to the catalog today, and thought I should record them here.

3/15 Meeting Notes

Attended by Allen, Askey, Devlin, Ekart, Maringanti, North, White

• Search Appliance
  • Probably will arrive by March 31st, so we need to know about UPS purchases now.  Dave W. will check with Julie about responding to Dale's earlier message to libtech.
• OPAC
  • Creating a virtual host for staff version of OPAC, with 60 minute timeout.  Should be a big help to catalogers and the ref desk.  Address will be staffcat.lib.ksu.edu.
  • Harish suggested a static "front page" for the OPAC to potentially drop the wait time for session loading.  We're going to wait and see how the response time is from the new servers before making a decision.
• Meridian
  • Installation can be completed Monday after the switch.  Marjorie will contact Endeavor to arrange.
• Servers
  • PHP  is ready on Grace.  Yongli has Grain Milling project, Sara Kearns has Assignment Calculator from U. Minnesota.
  • Harish volunteered to do mySQL admin.
  • Last meeting before server switch, so we reviewed the plan.  At 10:30 on Saturday, 3/25, dewey will be brought down.  m1 will be unmounted and remounted to Cosmos.  Dave W. says 20 minutes, but we have a 4 hour window. 
  • Pulsar is working, and can be tested.
  • www2 addresses become catalog.lib.ksu.edu alias, with DNS change on 3/25.
  • We won't make any more changes to horizon before the switch, Marjorie will copy over the few files Dale has modified since the original copy date.
  • Still OK to do preview server changes through Friday 3/24.
  • Staff will be notified this week by Michael about getting new .ini file for Voyager clients from the DID blog. Michael will work directly with 2 special cases.
  • We need a security certificate for the new servers.

Voyager Info for Server Migration

On Saturday, March 25th, our Voyager applications will move to a new server home.  This makes it necessary to change our Voyager .ini files.  The new .ini file uses an alias (basically, an IP address in words instead of numbers) so future server changes will not require any .ini changes, and so we can use the new .ini with the old servers during the next week or so.

The following instructions work best in IE.

To replace your exisiting Voyager .ini file:

Click this link. 
Choose Run from the popup box that appears.
Test a Voyager module that you use to verify that it works.

Note: After clicking Run, you may see a brief flash of a window appearing and disappearing.  This is normal.  Nothing else will happen.  If your Voyager modules work, you're fine.  If you really, really, really want to verify that something happened, you can go to C:/voyager, find the voyager.ini file, open it, and see that the server line now reads voyager.lib.ksu.edu.

If your Voyager modules will not run following this change, please contact Michael North for support.  If you need help with the instructions, please contact Michael or the DSPs.

You may do this at any time; it will also work with the old servers. Please make certain it is done on your computer, and any service point or student computers under your supervision, before the end of the day on Friday, March 24th.

Don't forget to join us for cake on Monday, March 27th from 2-3 pm in 118 to celebrate the server retirements!