I have been working on very similar things for Horizon. I guess Horizon
won't be along long, but I'll try to take a look at what you've done and
see if I can fit my Horizon stuff into the framework. If it's too much
trouble to fit my stuff into your framework though...

Jonathan

Karen Tschanz wrote:
> Hi, Godmar:
>
> I would be interested in receiving links from libraries that has
> implemented this, so that I could see the results. Thanks for your help!
> kst
>
>
>>>> Godmar Back <[log in to unmask]> 5/8/2007 3:37 PM >>>
>>>>
> Hi,
>
> following up on our discussion about how to extract holdings
> information from a III catalog, and following David's generous offer
> to share his code, I went ahead and started a sourceforge project:
> libxess.
>
> libxess is intended to bridge the gap between "Library 2.0" services
> and legacy ILS such as III Millennium and others. See the picture at
> http://libxess.sourceforge.net/ It is intended to provide a simple,
> yet clean web interface to a set of proxy scripts which in turn handle
> the specific access to those legacy systems.
>
> We have an immediate if mundane use for libxess in LibX: we'd like to
> show people what their library holds. Although we could have included
> this functionality via screen-scraping into the client, we felt for
> various reasons that it may be better to keep this as an optional,
> server-side service.
>
> Our vision is that if a library installs libxess, then it can benefit
> from all services that are "libxess-enabled." - LibX being just one of
> them. lnstalling libxess should be a low overhead operation, such as
> uploading a few php scripts to a server. Our target audience are not
> programmers, they're librarians who may have limited access to their
> ILS (*), but who usually have access to a web server and a place to
> run php scripts.
>
> I feel that many library-related projects, at least in as much as they
> interact with existing ILS, would benefit from such a facility, and,
> to my knowledge, there doesn't seem to be such a facility as of know.
> For this reason, I'd like to invite interested people to either
> contribute or give their input. You could contribute by, for instance,
> providing code for your catalog or whichever system you'd like to see
> supported. If so, give me your sourceforge account and I'll set you up
> with CVS access.
>
> Let me propose to use the sourceforge forum at
> http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=693773 for
> discussions.
>
> A related question is what the exported interface for this service
> should be. Right now, there's none. David's script returns MARC-XML.
> I'm wondering if this may be an application for unapi (and for me
> finally reason to read through its spec ;-). I had also considered
> OpenURL v0.1, but as an outsider I really know too little about
> library APIs and formats, so I'd be grateful for input here.
> Simplicity is paramount.
>
>  - Godmar
>
> (*) Keeping in mind that in some III-based libraries, you have to have
> reached a status that's comparable to OT4 just to gain the privilege
> to contact the vendor's helpdesk.
>
>

--
Jonathan Rochkind
Sr. Programmer/Analyst
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu