Library Systems

LITS Annual Report 2004-2005

In the late summer of 2004 a project was suggested as a pilot for MHC. The project was to have students who wrote a senior honors thesis submit their papers electronically as well as in the usual paper format to the Archives department within LITS. The thought was that we would eventually move from only paper to only digital submissions. My role was initially to only provide a Web submission form. As the project got under way, I devoted some time to the form and found that it would be quite simple to take the data students were submitting and have that stored in a database. Since having the data stored in a database meant that it would be fairly simple to query this database for anyone interested in looking at the electronically stored theses, the logical next step was taken, and I built a queryable Web page that would then display the results of a search. This was an enjoyable project from many perspectives, especially being able to work with my intern to create interesting layouts and using  JavaScript to create a compact design for navigating the results pages. While it was tempting to provide full-text searching of the electronic theses, a facility that I designed as part of the overall architecture, I decided to hold off on this feature until the future of the project becomes clear. It is quite likely that this pilot student thesis repository will be moved into a larger campus-wide institutional repository.

In the fall of 2004 I began work on MetaLib, an Ex Libris software designed to provide federated searching of a library's myriad databases and resources. Much of MetaLib relies on the functionality of Z39.50, an older protocol (circa 1984!) designed to allow different organizations the ability to search each others holdings. While this protocol does indeed still work properly, the nature of it is inconsistent, especially when searching many different resources through a single interface: the very nature of federated searching. My role in this implementation was to help in setting up the connections for many of our MHC resources. Unfortunately, the software version of MetaLib we were implementing was crippled by an almost complete lack of cross-browser compatibility, as well as a very inconsistent administrator interface that was baffling in its variety of errors. This led to a great deal of time spent logging bugs and reporting them to the software vendor, rather than accomplishing much in the way of actual implementation. The user interface also had so many outright bugs as well as such a poor user interface that MHC has decided to postpone implementation of MetaLib for at least one year. The question of whether we may implement MetaLib will be revisited in the summer of 2006.

In the spring of 2005 I added the functionally of a Patron Search Interface for the eResources database I had previously built. My main reason for doing this was because the A-Z list that came by default out of the Ex Libris SFX product (version 2) was clumsy and offered a poor search results interface: each letter of resources was listed on a single page. So a resource that had a few hundred listings creates a very long page for the user to scroll. Not very convenient. I also wanted to add some searching capabilities through having the data stored in a MySQL database. Fortunately, Ex Libris has vastly improved their search interface for Version 3 of SFX. It is now likely that we will implement their interface for searching title holdings.

The foregoing only lists the major projects that I was involved with from July 2004 to July 2005. There were many other smaller projects that claimed my attention, for example, upgrading ILLiad software and implementing the Odyssey Document Delivery portion of the ILLiad software. I was also on several cross-departmental teams that investigated things such as the state-of-the-art in Course Management Software. For a fuller listing of projects please visit my Projects page.

Prepared by
Brian Kysela
July 25, 2005.