From: Adam S. <Ada...@th...> - 2009-08-26 16:59:42
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We have several different locations where an item could live if it is on reserve. Vufind seems to only be able to say On Reserve - Ask at Circulation Desk. I would like to display the location information (most likely temp item location) instead. Please advise. Thanks, Adam Adam Shire Associate & Systems Librarian The Boston Architectural College 320 Newbury Street - Boston, MA 02115 617.585.0251 ada...@th... |
From: Demian K. <dem...@vi...> - 2009-08-26 19:43:46
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First of all, what ILS are you using? It may be possible to adjust the ILS driver so that it displays the appropriate temporary location at the top of the holdings tab (at present, some, if not all, drivers always display the permanent location -- I know that, for Voyager at least, a fix for this is being worked on). The "On Reserve - Ask at Circulation Desk" message is coming from the template file in /web/interface/themes/[your theme]/Record/view-holdings.tpl. Perhaps if you can get the temporary location to show up correctly, you can simply change this message to something more generic or appropriate, and that will serve your purpose. Alternatively, you might want to make further adjustments to the ILS driver to pass back an additional field beyond the current simple "yes or no" reserve setting. Hopefully this is some help, but if you need more information (like a more detailed explanation of what ILS drivers are and how they work), please let me know. Also feel free to make use of the vufind-tech mailing list if you plan on making code changes and have questions about the gory details. - Demian From: Adam Shire [mailto:Ada...@th...] Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 12:59 PM To: vuf...@li... Subject: [VuFind-General] reserve locations We have several different locations where an item could live if it is on reserve. Vufind seems to only be able to say On Reserve - Ask at Circulation Desk. I would like to display the location information (most likely temp item location) instead. Please advise. Thanks, Adam Adam Shire Associate & Systems Librarian The Boston Architectural College 320 Newbury Street - Boston, MA 02115 617.585.0251 ada...@th... |
From: Greg P. <Gre...@us...> - 2009-08-26 22:50:07
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Adam, We have (I think) a similar situation to what you are describing. Records like this: http://libcat.usq.edu.au/Record/vtls000501263 Are great test data (ie. they nearly always look horrible). It has records in three different campuses, two with records in a course readings (reserve) collection, and a mix of serials holdings and items holdings. Even if the location is only temporary the main issue is identifying how your ILMS stores that data then return it, and customising the record screen to match the new data. Greg Pendlebury Electronic Services Officer (Systems Team) Division of Academic Information Services University of Southern Queensland Phone: +61 7 4631 1501 Fax: +61 7 4631 1841 ________________________________ From: Demian Katz [mailto:dem...@vi...] Sent: Thursday, 27 August 2009 5:44 AM To: Adam Shire; vuf...@li... Subject: Re: [VuFind-General] reserve locations First of all, what ILS are you using? It may be possible to adjust the ILS driver so that it displays the appropriate temporary location at the top of the holdings tab (at present, some, if not all, drivers always display the permanent location -- I know that, for Voyager at least, a fix for this is being worked on). The "On Reserve - Ask at Circulation Desk" message is coming from the template file in /web/interface/themes/[your theme]/Record/view-holdings.tpl. Perhaps if you can get the temporary location to show up correctly, you can simply change this message to something more generic or appropriate, and that will serve your purpose. Alternatively, you might want to make further adjustments to the ILS driver to pass back an additional field beyond the current simple "yes or no" reserve setting. Hopefully this is some help, but if you need more information (like a more detailed explanation of what ILS drivers are and how they work), please let me know. Also feel free to make use of the vufind-tech mailing list if you plan on making code changes and have questions about the gory details. - Demian From: Adam Shire [mailto:Ada...@th...] Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 12:59 PM To: vuf...@li... Subject: [VuFind-General] reserve locations We have several different locations where an item could live if it is on reserve. Vufind seems to only be able to say On Reserve - Ask at Circulation Desk. I would like to display the location information (most likely temp item location) instead. Please advise. Thanks, Adam Adam Shire Associate & Systems Librarian The Boston Architectural College 320 Newbury Street - Boston, MA 02115 617.585.0251 ada...@th... This email (including any attached files) is confidential and is for the intended recipient(s) only. If you received this email by mistake, please, as a courtesy, tell the sender, then delete this email. The views and opinions are the originator's and do not necessarily reflect those of the University of Southern Queensland. Although all reasonable precautions were taken to ensure that this email contained no viruses at the time it was sent we accept no liability for any losses arising from its receipt. The University of Southern Queensland is a registered provider of education with the Australian Government (CRICOS Institution Code No's. QLD 00244B / NSW 02225M) |
From: Anne Scott(Library) <ann...@ca...> - 2009-08-31 03:31:58
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Hi We are just starting to look at VuFind as an option. We are a SirsiDynix Horizon Library. I am sure we will have lots of questions for this list as we proceed as VuFind is looking complicated to setup at first glance. My first question is rather basic. How do you export your MARC records in binary rather than text format? Thanks Anne **************************************************************** Anne Scott ann...@ca... Library IT Manager Library University of Canterbury, Te Whare Wananga o Waitaha ph 64 3 364 2038 fax 64 3 364 2055 (mail : Library, Private Bag 4800, University of Canterbury, Christchurch 8140, New Zealand **************************************************************** This email may be confidential and subject to legal privilege, it may not reflect the views of the University of Canterbury, and it is not guaranteed to be virus free. If you are not an intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately and erase all copies of the message and any attachments. Please refer to http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/emaildisclaimer for more information. |
From: Till K. <kin...@gm...> - 2009-08-31 07:38:19
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Anne Scott(Library) schrieb: > My first question is rather basic. How do you export your MARC records > in binary rather than text format? I don't know how to get binary MARC out of Horizon, but you may convert "ASCII MARC"/"MARC line format" to binary MARC using the yaz-mardump tool that is part of the free yaz toolkit available at http://www.indexdata.com/yaz The command yaz-mardump -i line -o marc [Exportfile] > data.mrc will do. Till -- http://twitter.com/tillk |
From: Bernhard E. <ev...@bi...> - 2009-08-31 08:12:02
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Till Kinstler schrieb: > >> My first question is rather basic. How do you export your MARC records >> in binary rather than text format? > > I don't know how to get binary MARC out of Horizon, but you may convert > "ASCII MARC"/"MARC line format" to binary MARC using the yaz-mardump > tool that is part of the free yaz toolkit available at > http://www.indexdata.com/yaz > The command > yaz-mardump -i line -o marc [Exportfile] > data.mrc > will do. This will do, as far as I see, only for UNIX/Linux or C++ programmers. For windows environments, there's Terry Reese's MarcEdit 5.1, to be downloaded from http://oregonstate.edu/~reeset/marcedit/html/downloads.html But this only underscores what I said many times: There *ought* to be a thorough, easy-to-follow documentation, illustrated and tested, on the matter of import. It is absolutely of crucial importance, and it should be of prime concern for the developers to provide this if they cannot enable anything else but the arcane binary MARC as input. Please, remove this pain in the neck that obviously stands in the way of easy implementation of VuFind like no other issue. Please drop everything else and do this first. B.Eversberg |
From: Till K. <kin...@gm...> - 2009-08-31 09:18:23
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Bernhard Eversberg schrieb: > Till Kinstler schrieb: >> The command >> yaz-mardump -i line -o marc [Exportfile] > data.mrc >> will do. > > This will do, as far as I see, only for UNIX/Linux or C++ programmers. YAZ is available on Windows as well: http://ftp.indexdata.dk/pub/yaz/win32/yaz_3.0.48.exe There is no graphical frontend, though. So run it on the command line... > But this only underscores what I said many times: There *ought* to > be a thorough, easy-to-follow documentation, illustrated and tested, on > the matter of import. Import is very easy and well documented on http://www.vufind.org/wiki/importing_records, when you have the data in binary MARC format. Bug your ILS vendor to tell you how to get data out of your ILS, we don't know for all the ILSes around. Vendors should learn that's a crucial requirement requested by customers. Feel free to add best practice documentation on data export for some ILSes on the VuFind wiki. You may do, if you feel it's crucial: Just create a wiki account and start writing... But I wouldn't like to maintain a zoo of import chains to support crappy ILS exports. We already have a zoo of ILS specific drivers... If you need something special, implement it. But at the moment, VuFind still relies on binary MARC to display data anyway, so you will always need binary MARC to use VuFind. That will change soon. Let's see if we will see importers for other formats then (I can imagine, we will provide one for Pica+ then :-). > It is absolutely of crucial importance, and it > should be of prime concern for the developers to provide this if they > cannot enable anything else but the arcane binary MARC as input. "binary MARC" in ISO2709 is a well defined, standard exchange format very common in the wild and there are some good open source tools for handling it. ILS vendors should support it. If not: Tell them to do! I think, it will be very hard to support all the obscure data formats you may pull out of some ILSes. Standards rule... > Please, remove this pain in the neck that obviously stands in the way of > easy implementation of VuFind like no other issue. There are other things that seem more important to me at the moment. But if you have some nice import chain for some format: Just put it up somewhere, add some lines to the documentation, and anyone may happily use it. Hey, that's open source software... Till -- http://twitter.com/tillk |
From: Demian K. <dem...@vi...> - 2009-08-31 14:16:05
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> I wasn't writing because I didn't know what to do for myself. > It is just that I notice that this subject recurs much too > often here, for the basic issue that it supposedly is. So, no > matter what the developers seem to think, this appears to be a major > stumbling block for just too many who otherwise get along > nicely, as they should. I've taken another stab at revising the import page: http://www.vufind.org/wiki/importing_records The biggest change is that I've expanded the single sentence about exporting records into a full section with more explanation and notes (including Till's suggestion about using YAZ). I've also created a new page so we have a place for collecting ILS-specific export notes. In any case, I don't claim that this really solves the problem -- it's just another baby step. As I see it, these are the remaining major issues we face in making the documentation more usable. I'd certainly welcome any help in overcoming them: 1.) We need to get the trunk stable and make another release. This doesn't need to stop us from making other documentation improvements in the meantime -- but in the short term, I think efforts to get code stabilized and released should be our highest priority. RC1 is no longer a good reflection of the state of the art of VuFind, but it has no stable successor -- we need to remedy that. Newer code has improvements that will make documented procedures simpler and more streamlined, but we can't update the documentation to reflect these fixes until we have a stable release that includes them. 2.) We need to document update procedures for keeping a VuFind system in sync with an ILS after the initial import. This is a tricky thing -- I'm sure many people are using hacked-together shell scripts and cron jobs that are extremely specific to their individual environments. Dealing with special cases like deleted and suppressed records varies from ILS to ILS. I don't know that there are established best practices to document, and trying to cover all the special cases is just going to cause confusion. I could add a very broad, general section similar to the new export bit to at least bring up the issues, but I'm not sure how helpful generalizations would be, and I don't know of a good way to really handhold somebody through the process in a universal way. Any suggestions/ideas? 3.) We need to decide on the target audience and scope for our documentation. Right now, most of our documentation assumes very little background knowledge. That's fine for the installation notes -- you can just blindly follow step by step and end up with a running copy of VuFind. But once the thing is installed, actually using it becomes a more analytical problem that requires more background knowledge. I don't want to turn people away by putting up a barrier saying "You need to know X, Y and Z to run VuFind." At the same time, I don't really think it's appropriate to try to explain complex subjects like shell scripting and cron jobs in our documentation when we can't hope to do them justice. There's a delicate balance between prescribing a fixed solution that the reader may not understand and telling the user to do something in general terms that they may not know how to translate into action. For what it's worth, I recently linked in a "read me first" (partially based on some of Greg Pendlebury's notes) to help provide useful background information to put a VuFind installation in context: http://www.vufind.org/wiki/installation_readme Maybe we also need something similar with recommended reading links to help get a potential VuFind administrator up to speed on potential issues. - Demian |
From: Bernhard E. <ev...@bi...> - 2009-08-31 09:43:18
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Till Kinstler wrote: > Bug your ILS vendor to tell you how to get data out > of your ILS, we don't know for all the ILSes around. I wasn't writing because I didn't know what to do for myself. It is just that I notice that this subject recurs much too often here, for the basic issue that it supposedly is. So, no matter what the developers seem to think, this appears to be a major stumbling block for just too many who otherwise get along nicely, as they should. *This* is the situation that needs to be remedied, and if no one seems to be ready to take that task from the shoulders of the developers, then it is their's to solve. And in their own best interest since this may help increase VuFind's market share like nothing else. And please do not assume that outside MARCistan everybody should have little trouble understanding and implementing MARC for their data. Inside that domain, they don't know the first thing about MAB either, or Pica+. (And I don't say they should, but they should understand it is an issue.) > Hey, that's open source software... > In this case, this is an unhelpful remark. Of course, people should help themselves when it comes to nice embellishments they want for themselves beyond the conent of the basic package. But this must be considered part of that package and people must get it right if they want to achieve a basic local implementation, upon which thereafter to start adding their own stuff. B.Eversberg |
From: Anne Scott(Library) <ann...@ca...> - 2009-09-02 05:20:34
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Hi Ray, thank you very much for your help. The standard Horizon MARC outputs do work. I am not sure what happened the first time we tried. And thanks for the tip about the bib#. Demian, the documentation is better with the change. I agree also that a regular new stable release would be very helpful. There was a comment about scripting and cron jobs and the level of documentation required. It would be great to have an example to follow of scripts to do particular things. It is easier to modify an example than to do something from scratch. Now I just have to work out why all I am getting is a blank screen in the browser. It must have something to do with httpd-vufind.conf or conf.d. Cheers Anne PS One thing that I would like is for all the filenames to be in lower case. > > We are just starting to look at VuFind as an option. We are a > > SirsiDynix Horizon Library. I am sure we will have lots of > questions > > for this list as we proceed as VuFind is looking > complicated to setup > > at first glance. > > > > My first question is rather basic. How do you export your MARC > > records in binary rather than text format? > > > Hi Anne, > > There are two methods that I know of. The one that is most > flexible is MarcOut.exe, available from SirsiDynix at > http://clientcare.sirsidynix.com/index.php?goto=Product&pid=16 > &Downloads. > Make sure to download the one that matches your version of > Horizon. The second method is found under "Cataloging" in > the Horizon Launcher application - look for "Export" and then > "Batch Bib Export". You'll be asked to select an export > target, hopefully you'll have a couple to choose from. If > not, it's easy enough to create one that doesn't export item > data - just click "add", give "Target" an arbitrary name such > "noitem" and description such as "Don't export item > information" then click "Close" and "Yes" to save. > Regardless of which of these two methods you choose, you will > have to have at least one export target set up. Setting up > an export target that also exports item information, if you > don't already have one, is a bit of a can of worms. > > When checking holdings and item status, VuFind queries your > ILS database using the bib#s associated with the imported > marc records (assuming that your VuFind Horizon driver is > working). That means you have to make sure that the marc > records you import have a tag somewhere containing the bib# - > ours did not. We ended up putting the bib# in the 999a tag > by using the "/q999" switch on the MarcOut.exe command line. > In any case you have to make sure that the tag containing the > bib# is correct in VuFind's import/marc.properties file > before importing, in our case that required changing the line > "id = 001, first" to "id = 999a". > > I personally didn't get much farther than this before > deciding to wait for the next release of VuFind. RC1 has a > bunch of little (and a few > big) bugs, the solutions to which might be found by scouring > the mailing list archives and the bug database, however other > projects require my attention and I back-burnered VuFind. > This email may be confidential and subject to legal privilege, it may not reflect the views of the University of Canterbury, and it is not guaranteed to be virus free. If you are not an intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately and erase all copies of the message and any attachments. Please refer to http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/emaildisclaimer for more information. |
From: Demian K. <dem...@vi...> - 2009-09-02 15:05:02
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> There was a comment about scripting and cron jobs and the level of > documentation required. It would be great to have an example to follow > of scripts to do particular things. It is easier to modify an example > than to do something from scratch. Agreed. Once I have a good understanding of our whole process here, I plan on writing up some documentation... but I'm inheriting somebody else's configuration, and I don't want to share until I'm sure I know what I'm talking about, so it may be a little while. If anybody else wants to add to the wiki in the meantime, that would be great. > Now I just have to work out why all I am getting is a blank screen in > the browser. It must have something to do with httpd-vufind.conf or > conf.d. Have you tried uncommenting the PHP debug lines in httpd-vufind.conf and/or turning on debug in web/conf/config.ini? Those usually help narrow down the cause of blank screen problems. > PS One thing that I would like is for all the filenames to be in lower > case. Any particular reason for this? There are a lot of mixed case filenames in the project, and I think you'd have a lot of difficulty changing them because of all the dependencies involved (unless you're using a case-insensitive operating system). If it's just the mixed-case URLs that you don't like, perhaps some mod_rewrite magic could solve the problem without actually changing the filenames, though.... - Demian |