Launch!

September 6, 2007 – 3:09 pm

A little more than two years after I realized how (really) bad the problem was and about 18 months after I prototyped my solution, our new library website, catalog, and knowledgebase launched last week — just in time for the fall semester opening.
It’s all built on Scriblio, includes a very simple new books list that [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (4)



Presentation: Faceted Searching And Our Cataloging Norms

January 24, 2007 – 12:31 pm

ALA Midwinter 2007, ALCTS Cataloging Norms Discussion Group presentation: Metadata and faceted searching: an implementation report based on WPopac. (slides: QuickTime & PDF.)
Faceted searching such as that made possible by WPopac (look for the new name soon) improves the usability of our systems and findability of our materials, but also puts new demands on how [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (2)

Let The Silence Roar

January 17, 2007 – 11:08 am

Okay, before anybody inquires if I’ve gone into boat sales or brings up the BisonBoom story again, I need to ask for your understanding. It’s not that I’ve been spending my days trying to pick out just the right shade of red for my new Corvette (really I’m not, it’s the Lotus I like), or [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (1)

WordPress 2.1 + WPopac

December 12, 2006 – 9:58 am

I’ve been following WP2.1 development, but Aaron Brazell’s post in the development blog wrapped up a lot of questions all at once.
The short story is that 2.1 is going to bring some really good changes that will allow more flexibility and better optimization of WPopac. Of the four changes Brazell names, the last two, the [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (1)

Woot! Woot!

December 4, 2006 – 2:00 pm

The press release:
Making Libraries Relevant in an Internet-Based Society
PSU?s Casey Bisson wins Mellon Award for innovative search software for libraries
PLYMOUTH, N.H. ? You can?t trip over what?s not there. Every day millions of Internet users search online for information about millions of topics. And none of their search results include resources from the countless libraries [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (36)



Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0

October 27, 2006 – 4:17 pm

MAIUG 2006 Philadelphia: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0 (interactive QuickTime with links or static PDF)
Web 2.0 and other ?2.0? monikers have become loaded terms. But as we look back at the world wide web of 1996, there can be little doubt that today’s web is better and more useful. Indeed, that seems to be [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (2)

Catching Bugs Before They Catch You

August 23, 2006 – 8:47 pm

I got itchy about magic quotes the other day because it’s the cause (through a fairly long cascade of errors) of some performance problems and runaways I’ve been seeing lately (pictured above).
But I deserve most of the blame for allowing a query like this to run at all:

SELECT type, data, count(*) AS hits
FROM wpopac_WPopac_bibs_atsk
WHERE data [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (0)

Dang addslashes() And GPC Magic Quotes

August 22, 2006 – 8:20 pm

Somewhere in the WordPress code extra slashes are being added to my query terms.
I’ve turned GPC magic quotes off via a php_value magic_quotes_gpc 0 directive in the .htaccess file (we have far too much legacy code that nobody wants to touch to turn it off site-wide). And I know my code is doing one run [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (3)

WPopac Reloaded

August 21, 2006 – 12:42 pm

I’ve re-thought the contents of the record and summary displays in WPopac. After some experimentation and a lot of listening, it became clear that people needed specific information when looking at a search result or a catalog record.
So now, when searching for Cantonese slang, for instance, the summary displays show the title, year, format, [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (4)

It’s Official

July 23, 2006 – 3:56 pm

WPopac, a project I started on my nights and weekends, is now officially one of my day-job projects too.
We’ve been using our WPopac-based catalog as a prototype since February 2006, but the change not only allocates a portion of my work time specifically to the development of the project, but also reflects the library’s decision [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (9)

NELINET 2006 IT Conference Proposal

July 17, 2006 – 12:40 pm

I recently submitted my proposal for the 2006 NELINET Information Technology Conference.
It’s about WPopac, of course, but the excitement now is that the presentation would be the story of the first library outside PSU to implement it.
WPopac is an open source replacement for a library’s online catalog that improves the usability, findability, and remixability of [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (5)

The URLs From My Portland Talk

June 6, 2006 – 11:53 am

Following Edward Tufte’s advice, I’ve been wanting to offer a presentation without slides for a long time now; I finally got my chance in Portland. The downside is that now I don’t have anything to offer as a takeaway memory aid for my talk. My speaking notes are too abstract to offer for public consumption, [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (0)

Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0

May 21, 2006 – 10:38 am

IUG 2006 presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0 (also available as a PDF with space for notes)

This is an update of my ALA Midwinter presentation.

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (10)

WPopac Gets Googled

May 4, 2006 – 11:50 am

A discussion on Web4Lib last month raised the issue of Google indexing our library catalogs. My answer spoke of the huge number of searches being done in search engines every day and the way that people increasingly expect that anything worth finding can be found in Google.
There were doubts about the effectiveness of such plans, [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (6)

Boolean Searching in WPopac

April 25, 2006 – 12:35 pm

WPopac takes advantage of MySQL’s indexing and relevance-ranked searching (go ahead, try it), including boolean searching (on MySQL versions > 4.x). Here are some details and examples taken wholesale from the MySQL manual:

+
A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each result returned. 
-
A leading minus sign indicates that this word must [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (1)