K-State Libraries: Digital Initiatives

New: Html equivalent of rss feeds for new books

Sometime back Beth Turtle made a great suggestion to create html version of rss feeds for new books  that would complement the existing feeds. Here is a brief demo of how the pages would look like - https://catalog.lib.ksu.edu/ksul/rss/html/biology.html  [just replace 'biology' with other subjects to see their respective html versions].

Though the major thing is done, there are a few things that need to be done - (i) Create a light weight header with an embedded search box (ii) List some helpful links to rss tutorials and (iii) modify the index page to link subjects to both feeds and html pages.

As always, please take a look at it and pass on your comments/suggestions (especially if you come across any useful rss tutorials to link to ).

Additional RSS feeds: DVDs, CDs, etc

We had several requests for additional rss feeds from our catalog - one for DVDs, one for CDs and an another one for feeds by location. The revised version [1.5 - why not 2.0?], under test, generates seperate feeds for DVDs, CDs and one for "reference books on Hale 2nd floor" [location feed]. This version also fixes some issues that arose because of inconsistencies in the call numbers[documented in our local test wiki]. This should go into production early next week if all goes well.

The 3 new feeds are at: http://catalog.lib.ksu.edu/ksul/rss/test/newfeeds.html
Note: The links will point to the actual xml files and you need to point your rss readers to the individual locations.

Title lookup from any webpage

ISBN lookup has certain limitations in that that it works only with isbns and that too isbns that appear in the urls[amazon]. We can definitely customize it and extend it further to lookup isbns anywhere on the webpage. But after getting some input from Adam and Sara, I agree that it would be nice to have a title lookup feature rather than just an isbn lookup.

For starters, we now have a title lookup feature. This bookmarklet does a couple of things - 1) You can select text on any web page and do a title lookup on our catalog. (2) If you are on Amazon.com, then this script would extract title from the webpage automatically and do a title lookup - so you don't have to select text explicitly when on Amazon. The second feature works only for Amazon though, at the moment. To install just right click on the link below and save it to your bookmarks/favorites.
Title lookup

In version2.0, we'll try and integrate with xisbn service from OCLC. What this does is gives us an ability to go beyond the given isbn and gather information from related isbns [eg: given an isbn for a paperback, we'll get isbn for hardcover,etc]. More on this later..