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Technical Projects

This page describes the process of developing and/or implementing technologies required for the Summit migration. Most of the information here consists of technical specifications and and is used by those on developing these technologies for planning and monitoring progress.

Current projects include making sure OCLC holdings are correct, providing real time availability of items held by libraries, integration with existing OPACs (e.g. pass through searching), ensuring links requiring authentication will customized as necessary for users coming from different institutions, and developing good workflows.

Useful development resources can be found here.
  1. Update OCLC holdings
    2. Requirements:
    • Make local bibliographic and serials holdings up to date in OCLC
    • Accommodate local records lacking OCLC numbers
    • TBD
    Progress:
    • N/A
     
  2. Provide SRU target for OCLC
    3. Requirements:
    • Accepts incoming OCLC, ISSN, and ISBN number searches
    • Displays real time item location and availability
    • All data elements normalized for use with VDX
    • Displays summary holding statements for serials
    • Displays electronic holdings from URLs in checkin, item, and bib records, routing through local proxy servers as necessary
    • Does not display holdings or availability for nonmembers of Summit on shared systems or restricted records
    • Quick response
    • Minimal load on local servers
    Progress:
    • Prototype at http://alliancedev.uoregon.edu/cgi-bin/get_local.py?oclc=1124917 (change oclc to value to be searched)
    • Retrieval of real time item availabilty, serials summaries, and links in checkin, ERM, and 856 fields using distributed search
    • Still needed:
      • ISN support
      • Z39.50 to use as an ILLiad target as well as OCLC
      • Better distributed harvesting mechanism before Summit goes away (Current plan is to have local admins use create lists to mount plain text files containing bib numbers and ISNs of changed bibs)

  3. Accurate OCLC and ISBN/ISSN information for availability service
    4. Requirements:
    • Simultaneous harvest of catalogs (multithreaded across, but not within catalogs)
    • Spiders 1000 records past last successful retrieval. Each day that no new records are detected, double the look ahead (e.g. 2000, 4000, 8000, etc) until a new record is found. At that point, drop to 1000
    • Use XRECORD to extract OCLC, ISBN, and ISSN for records with BCODES scheduled for contribution. Normalize all values (e.g. ISBN only contains 0-9 and X)
    • Write harvested results to file which is loaded into db only after harvest is complete
    • Plays nice to reduce load during peak hours
    Progress:
    • Multithreading example code on alliancedev in /root/scripts/examples/threading.py
    • Example code for extracting a MARC tag in /root/scripts/examples/extract_tag_from_III_xml.py
    • Multithreaded URL retriever that also opens MySQL connection code can be found in /root/scripts/summit/local/get_local.py
    • Local bib numbers and institution associated with OCLC numbers in summit.local_bibs on allianceharvest.uoregon.edu
     
  4. Provide "Resolver Resolver"
    5. Requirements:
    • Direct incoming OpenURL requests to local or OpenURL compliant request form at local institution
    • Requires minimal input from users
    • Recognizes institutional IP ranges
    • Allows people to be remembered so preferences are saved
    Progress:  
  5. Javascript to provide pass through searching from local catalogs to .org platform
    6. Requirements:
    • Displays button in local III catalog that passes through most recent search to .org platform (probably WWWOPTIONS hack)
    • Searches involving specific fields and limits are preserved
    • Recognizes scopes from local catalogs (e.g. search in journals scope will be limited to serials in .org). Ideally, script knows scopes at local catalogs, but easy script configuration is OK
    Progress:
    • Jon Scott (WSU), Jerry Becker (WSU), and Paul McMillin (TESC) working on prototype. Current work viewable at http://griffin.wsu.edu:2082/ (conduct search and then click on the "Search Summit" button)
    • Passes author, title, keyword, ISBN, subject

  6. Improve workflow for during transition period
    7. Requirements:
    • Create bibs in local system
    • Generate barcodes to facilitate processing
    • TBD
    Progress:
    • Script created at Lewis and Clark that works with Clio