There's also XTF, <http://xtf.sourceforge.net/>, which we are
presently using to index our records in an experiment to see if we
can do retrieval/ranking better than our ILS vendor (a bit of a straw
man, but....).
Roy

On Oct 27, 2005, at 3:38 PM, John Durno wrote:

> You might want to have a look at Zebra for the indexing engine.
> http://indexdata.dk/zebra/
>
> Great tool for making a file of MARC records Z searchable.
>
>
> John
>
> On 27-Oct-05, at 2:58 PM, Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
>
>
>> On Oct 27, 2005, at 2:06 PM, Andrew Nagy wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>>  http://mylibrary.ockham.org/
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> I have been thinking of ways, similiar to what you have done that
>>> you
>>> mentioned below with the Ockham project, to allow more modern day
>>> access
>>> with our library catalog.  I have been beginning to think about
>>> devising
>>> a way to index/harvest our entire catalog (and allow this indexing
>>> process to run every so often) to allow our own custom access
>>> methods.
>>> We could then generate our own custom RSS feeds of new books, allow
>>> more
>>> efficient/enticing search interfaces, etc.
>>>
>>> Do you know of any existing software for indexing or harvesting a
>>> catalog into another datastore (SQL Database, XML Database, etc).
>>> I am
>>> sure I could fetch all of the records somehow through Z39.50 and
>>> dump it
>>> into a MySQL database, but maybe there is some better method?
>>>
>>>
>>
>> I too have thought about harvesting content from my local catalog and
>> providing new interfaces to the content, and I might go about this in
>> a number of different ways.
>>
>> 1. I might use OAI to harvest the content, cache is locally, and
>> provide services against the cache. This cache might be saved on a
>> file system, but more likely into a relational database.
>>
>> 2. I might simply dump all the MARC records from my catalog,
>> transform them into something more readable, say sets of HTML/XML
>> records, and provide services against these files.
>>
>> The weakest link in my chain would be my indexer. Relational
>> databases are notoriously ill-equipped to handle free text searching.
>> Yes, you can implement it and you can use various database-specific
>> features to implement free text searching, but they still won't work
>> as well as an indexer. My only experience with indexers lies in
>> things like swish-e and Plucene. I sincerely wonder whether or not
>> these indexers would be up to the task.
>>
>> Supposing I could find/use an indexer that was satisfactory, I would
>> then provide simple and advanced (SRU/OpenSearch) search features
>> against the index of holdings. Search results would then be enhanced
>> with the features such as borrow, re-new, review, put on reserve,
>> save as citation, email, "get it for me", put on hold, "what's new?",
>> view as RSS, etc. These services would require a list of authorized
>> users of the system -- a patron database.
>>
>> In short, since I would have direct access to the data, and since I
>> would have direct to the index, I would use my skills to provide
>> services them. For the most part, I don't mind back-end,
>> administrative, data-entry interfaces to our various systems, but I
>> do have problems with the end-user interfaces. Let me use those back-
>> ends to create and store my data, then give me unfettered access to
>> the data and I will provide my own end-user interfaces. Another
>> alternative is to exploit (industry standard) Web Services computing
>> techniques against the existing integrated library system. In this
>> way you get XML data (information without presentation) back and you
>> can begin to do the same things.
>>
>> --
>> Eric Lease Morgan
>> University Libraries of Notre Dame
>>
>>
>
> --
> John Durno
> Project Coordinator
> BC Electronic Library Network
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Phone: 604-268-7002
> Fax: 604-291-3023
> Email:   [log in to unmask]
> Web: http://www.eln.bc.ca
>
>