A little more than two years after I realized how (really) bad the problem was and about 18 months after I
January 24, 2007
Presentation: Faceted Searching And Our Cataloging Norms
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 [...]
January 17, 2007
Let The Silence Roar
December 12, 2006
WordPress 2.1 + WPopac
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, [...]
December 4, 2006
Woot! Woot!
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 [...]
October 27, 2006
Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0
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 [...]
August 23, 2006
Catching Bugs Before They Catch You
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 [...]
August 22, 2006
Dang addslashes() And GPC Magic Quotes
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 [...]
August 21, 2006
WPopac Reloaded
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, [...]
July 23, 2006
It’s Official
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 [...]
July 17, 2006
NELINET 2006 IT Conference Proposal
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 [...]
June 6, 2006
The URLs From My Portland Talk
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, [...]
May 21, 2006
Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0
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.
May 4, 2006
WPopac Gets Googled
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 [...]
April 25, 2006
Boolean Searching in WPopac
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 [...]
April 17, 2006
WordPress Baseline Changes To Support WPopac
I’ve whittled things down to the point where the only baseline change from WordPress 2.0.2 is in the next_posts_link function of the wp-includes/template-functions-links.php file. The change is necessary because WPopac rewrites the SQL search queries in a way that’s incompatible with a piece of this function, but necessary for performance reasons.
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