[Blacklight-development] Hello!

[Jonathan Rochkind]

Awesome, very pleased to hear that.

I guess I owe those of you who don't know me an introduction. I am an 
engineer at Johns Hopkins Libraries. We are currently formally 
'investigating' several open source 'next generation discovery layer' 
tools. Blacklight being just one. So I am not moving forward 
aggressively with Blacklight or anything; rather we in the systems 
department have been directed to get some knowledge about what is out 
there, feasibility of adopting it here, strengths and weaknesses of 
available solutions, etc.  I'm currently spending about one day a week 
on such efforts, currently focused on blacklight.

So the moral of the story is, I'm in no particular rush, and certainly 
can wait a few more days for something from you. :)

As far as holdings--I don't think there's any way to get around being 
very instance-dependent. That is, not only does it need to be different 
from one ILS vendor to another---but often from one location of a given 
ILS product to another! This is what I've found in my explorations with 
that stuff for other purposes. So the best bet is writing software 
that's easily configurable and extendable--the trick of course is 
figuring out the right architecture for that, cleverly abstracting out 
what really will be common  to them all to eliminate duplication of logic.

With Horizon that I've got, I actually found I do better avoiding the 
z39.50 server and using an XML layer that the Horizon OPAC provides.

Jonathan

Jonathan

Matt M. wrote:
> I've joined the list! :)
>
> I want to get in and comment to some of the questions here, seems like Erik
> has done a great at that so far. I'll get back asap Monday. Until then, just
> wanted to let everyone know that a much better Flare is coming. The code is
> a lot more simple, documented and tested. Please just hold on a couple more
> days! My intention was never to really fork Flare, I had a limited amount of
> time to get some things working that the original Flare did not provide. I
> would *love* to create a patch and get this merged into the real Flare. I'll
> admit though, I love the title "forker of flare". That's so cool!
>
> Also, I've recently found a great way to get holdings information using
> Z39.50 and created a nice little helper class. It uses YAZ, and ruby-marc.
> You can do things like:
>
> s = Z3950.connect('virgo.lib.virginia.edu', 2020, 'unicorn')
> record = s.find_by_ckey('2993872')
> record.holdings.each do |item|
>   item.available?
>   item.current_location
>   item.home_location
> end
>
> The problem is, the solution is very dependent on what our Z39.50 server is
> spitting out. The field we use for holdings is 926 I think. You can
> customize your server as needed. It'd be great to get that documented
> somewhere so everyone could use this functionality.
>
> Cheers!
> - m
>
>   
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-- 
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886 
rochkind (at) jhu.edu