OPAC Googlenator

OPAC Googlenator

Ross Singer, Julian Pardy, Julian Pardy, Jennifer Svarckopf, Pat Moore, Michelle Gauthier, Stan Orlov, Max Yermakhanov

First Steps

Mash-ups rule. We took idea 8 and 19 and mashed them. Original ideas were to be able to browse the library collection geographically, being able to focus on an area and see Travel books, History, etc. The other idea was to provide out-of-copyright material from GoogleBooks from the OPAC

We agreed that we couldn't go from a map to the OPACs holdings today (user at the map, then bring up a result set from geo-selection). So we're working from the OPAC item record to a map showing where in the world the item is using the 651. As well, linking out to services to retrieve items by showing local/regionally availability and where to get out-of-copyright material online (both text and audio).

Tasks

• Find some results in LibraVox, Library of Congress, Project Gutenberg that would allow us to demo the idea.

• Looking at which parts of Marc record we want to harvest to use to link out to services.

• Finding a place to display our results on the LoC site.

• Spell Check script.

 

Technically speaking...

• Greasemonkey to insert the data into webVoyage
  
  
• Ruby on Rails backend to call from Greasemonkey, asks Yahoo for spelling suggestions based on query terms
  
  
• For 'record display' screen, grabs the LoC record via SRU and grabs 020 $a (ISBN), 650$z and 651$a (place names).
  
  
• With ISBN, makes a web client to ask Google Books if there is a page there
  
  
• With place names, make links to Google Maps

Would be easy to add holdings from Worldcat.org on same principle.