photo: moriah sunrise
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
