Jonathan --
I suspect a message sent to the developers network mailing list would have the greatest possibility of hitting the most right people. (Perhaps the only higher action-to-frustration route than posting it here on code4lib itself.)
Peter
On Feb 23, 2012, at 5:52 PM, "Jonathan Rochkind" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On 2/23/2012 5:35 PM, Stephen Hearn wrote:
>> But there's a catch--when WorldCat redirects a search to the selected
>> local library catalog, it targets the OCLC record number. If the
>> holding library has included the OCLC record number in its indexed
>> data, the user goes right to the desired record. If not, the user is
>> left wondering why the title of interest turned into some mysterious
>> number and the search failed.
>
> I've been wishing OCLC would change this for a while.
>
> When specifying WorldCat's redirects for your local catalog, it's
> already possible to NOT specify an OCLCnum based search, but only
> specify an ISBN, ISSN, etc search. If you do this, and the record HAS
> an (eg) ISBN, it'll redirect to an ISBN search in your catalog. But if
> the record doesn't have an ISBN, ISSN, etc, I think it'll just redirect
> to your catalog home page.
>
> So WorldCat is already capable of redirecting to an ISBN search. But if
> you config the OCLCnum search, it seems it'll always use it instead.
>
> I wish WorldCat instead would do the ISBN search if there is an ISBN, do
> an ISSN search if there's an ISSN, and only resort to the OCLCnum search
> if there's no ISBN or ISSN to search on. Or at least that could be a
> configurable option. Would result in a greater proportion of succesful
> 'hits' when redirecting to local catalog, which may not have an OCLCnum
> in it for every single record that it possibly could. (For that matter,
> what about when there are multiple OCLCnums, multiple records, for the
> same manifestation? For instance, a German language cataloging record
> and an English language cataloging record, for the exact same
> manifestation, have a different OCLCnum. Will OCLC ever send the German
> language cataloging record OCLCnum and miss becuase you had the English
> language one? I dunno).
>
> Anyhow, I've tried making this suggestion before to relevant OCLC
> people, but it's possible I never found the relevant OCLC people. It's
> kind of hard to figure out how to make such feature suggestions to OCLC
> in a way that won't just be dropped on the floor (not sure it's
> possible, in fact).
>
> Jonathan
>
>
>> Stephen
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 4:11 PM, David Friggens<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>>>> why local library catalog records do not show up in search results?
>>> Basically, most OPACs are crap. :-) There are still some that that
>>> don't provide persistent links to record pages, and most are designed
>>> so that the user has a "session" and gets kicked out after 10 minutes
>>> or so.
>>>
>>> These issues were part of Tim Spalding's message that as well as
>>> joining web 2.0, libraries also need to join web 1.0.
>>> http://vimeo.com/user2734401
>>>
>>>>> We don't allow crawlers because it has caused serious performance issues in the past.
>>> Specifically (in our case at least), each request creates a new
>>> session on the server which doesn't time out for about 10 minutes,
>>> thus a crawler would fill up the system's RAM pretty quickly.
>>>
>>>> You can use Crawl-delay:
>>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard#Crawl-delay_directive
>>>>
>>>> You can set Google's crawl rate in Webmaster Tools as well.
>>> I've had this suggested before and thought about it, but never had it
>>> high up enough in my list to test it out. Has anyone actually used the
>>> above to get a similar OPAC crawled successfully and not brought down
>>> on its knees?
>>>
>>> David
>>
>>
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