Afternoon of Day 1 of Code4lib 2014.
Tag: discovery layer
OCUL URM Summit – Notes
Today was the OCUL URM Summit at UofT. These are a bit more sparse than usual. The survey results in particular were done quickly so I only included the higher numbers, not all of them. Continue reading “OCUL URM Summit – Notes”
code4libTO December Meetup Talks
BagIt Profiles – @ruebot
- directory of data
- bag has what you’re bagging, data, contact email/name, organization information, profile identifier (JSON via a URI)
- pull in all the field values
- validate
- wrote a spec and send it to digital curation community
- can look up profiles in the registry
Okay, I got a little lost, but you can see more on github.
Internet Archive Torrent Collections (iaTorrent) – @ruebot
- see demo
Bookfinder – @TheRealArty & Steven
- I will write this up later probably as a separate blog post, or maybe journal article
TPL’s Web Services Architecture: Understanding the Big Picture – @waharnum
- many different systems that don’t easily communicate, which needs specialized knowledge even to do basic tasks
- address the challenges by translation, simplication, standardization
- Three tiers: Front End Systems (requests to back end) / TPL Web Services (REST) / Back End Systems (responds to front end)
- Example: TPL Website -> Account Web Services -> Symphony Web Services (Symphony) – and back
- can add new features and functions
- helps to solve the challenges mentioned
- also helps with reusability e.g. in addition to website, build mobile-friendly website, iPhone App
- Might end up with:
- Front End (Website, mobile, App)
- Middle Tier (Account Web Services, ebook Web Services, online payment web services)
- Back End (symphony, overdrive, payment gateway, accounting systems)
- other benefits:
- increase ease of knowledge transfer about how our systems work
- follow modern best practice approach to building interoperating systems
- reduce cost and integration time
- reduce learning time for new staff or consultants
- metrics: wish had resources
- bolting together a lot of things, not using a lot of custom code
Ladder (aka MyTPL 2) – @mjsuhonos
- wanted to solve problem: discovery layers suck
- problems:
- not scalable
- inflexible
- read-only
- expensive
- goals:
- better than open source options (VuFind, Blacklight)
- cheaper (than proprietary)
- scalable as WorldCat
- design:
- schema-free/multi-schema (e.g. Dublin Core)
- horizontally scalable (multi-node)
- modern OSS components
- simple data model (RDF)
- Features:
- hierarchical relations
- clustering/de-duplication
- versioning
- real-time import & indexing
- multi-thread/process
- responsive UI
- fully multilingual (18/10)
- dynamic faceting
- dynamic mapping modification
- digital content storage (coming soon)
- built on a linked data
- not a discovery layer; it’s an integration platform
Heritage U of T – @ajmcalorum
- News Announcement and Promotional Video
- previously not centralized: hard drives, flickr, etc.
- need central repository for tri-campus initiative with search & discovery, preservation, long-term access to content and metadata, support for multiple formats (e.g. images, books, documents, video, exhibits)
- Drupal + Solr (search) + Fedora Commons (collection management, batch ingesting, metadata crosswalk, digital preservation) == islandora (digital asset management system)
- pilot: 8 parent collections (by format, by campus)
- exhibits in Drupal, not through islandora/fedora commons
- modules: internet archive book reader (OCR on the fly), galleria, colorbox
- official launch: 2 weeks ago
That’s it! Food and drinks time!
Code4lib Day 3: Lightning Talks
David Uspal – Project Grab Bag
Interactive Map
- Javascript baed (for accessibility)
- Data stored in JSON file
- SVG graphic
- Uses the Raphael.js library – just use HTML5 instead
- Search by: ocation, person, call number
- To do:
- decouple from CMS (Concrete 5)
- SVG path generation as a web application
- add more configurable options (colors, etc.)
Tap Tour
- started at the Indianapolis Museum of Art
- easy to create a mobile tour application
- currently iPhone/iPod, plans to expand
- Drupal CMS back-end (new version released 1/25/2012)
Robert Haschart – Adding Publicly-Accessible Hathi Trust Items to Your Solr-based Discovery System
- Assumptions:
- Solr-based index
- SolrMarc used for indexing
- only want publicly-accessible items
- MARC record based with one Solr record per title
- list of Hathi-items and download
- tweak SolrMarc index specification
- add all Hathi records to your index, and adjust interface code to display records correctly
- download daily updates, merge updates
- Code not yet available
Jeremy Nelson – Aristotle a Django based Discovery Layer
- See it in Action
- originally forked from Kochief
- refactored to use Sunburnt for Solr interactions
- developed custom authentication middleware with Millenium
- did web redesign
- Code on Github
Dennis Schafroth – Turbo MARC in YAZ Library
- Problem: XSL transformation on MARC XML is slow
- Rule: combined the element with tag/code value when value is allowed
- Pazpar2 became twice as fast
- a lot faster, but not official standard
Yuka Egusa, Masao Takaku – Recovery of Minamisanriku Town Library from Tsunami Disaster
- implemented technical support for a library system – thanks to OSS and cloud service
- Amazon’s wish list for books needed from supporters
- library can announce library service and daily activities on Facebook
- Next-L Enju OSS search system
Ed Summers – jobs.code4lib.org
- Jobs are posted
- Tags allow to see all the jobs with that tag
- OpenID log in
- pushes to twitter @code4lib
- pushes to mailing list
- Code on Github
Christopher Spalding – Search in a Blender
- works for ExLibris
- collect results and sort
- works in VuFind and Solr
Erik Hetzner – Strategy for c4l voting
- majoritarian: top-rated talks are chosen
- no representation for small parties
- each voter gets unlimited votes, 0-3 points
- Plurality-at-large
- 1 vote total
- Cumulative voting
- number of votes up to talks, but can allow multiple votes
- Hacking
- the way done now, reduces to plurality at large
- Fix
- limit points users can assign
- and/or only users to give one vote to teach talk
- or adopt a proportional representation system
- Inspire by Numbers Rule: The Vexing Mathematics of Democracy
Lightning Talks That Didn’t Happen
- Hillel Arnold – Occupy Wall Street Documentation
- Jason Clark – BookMeUp (Book Suggestions App)
- Jason Ronallo – Digital Collections, Crawling, and Aggregating Content
Code4lib Day 2: How People Search the Library from a Single Search Box
by Cory Lown, North Carolina State University
While there is only one search box, typically there are multiple tabs, which is especially true of academic libraries.
- 73% of searches from the home page start from the default tab
- which was actually opposite of usability tests
Home grown federated search includes:
- catalog
- articles
- journals
- databases
- best bets (60 hand crafted links based on most frequent queries e.g. Web of Science)
- spelling suggestions
- loaded links
- FAQs
- smart subjects
Show top 3-4 results with link to full interface.
Search Stats
From Fall 2010 and Spring 2011, ~739k searches 655k click-throughs
By section:
- 7.8% best bets (sounds very little, but actually a lot for 60 links)
- 41.5% articles, 35.2% books and media, 5.5% journals, ~10% everything else
- 23% looking for other things, e.g. library website
- for articles: 70% first 3 results, other 30% see all results
- trends of catalogue use is fairly stable, but articles peaks at the end of term
How to you make use of these results?
Top search terms are fairly stable over time. You can make the top queries work well for people (~37k) by using the best bets.
Single/default search signals that our search tools will just work.
It’s important to consider what the default search box doesn’t do, and doubly important to rescue people when they hit that point.
Dynamic results drive traffic. When putting few actual results, the use of the catalogue for books went up a lot compared to suggesting to use the catalogue.
Collecting Data
Custom log is being used right now by tracking searches (timestamp, action, query, referrer URL) and tracking click-throughs. An alternative might be to use Google Analytics.
For more, see the slides below or read the C&RL Article Preprint.