iNODE

Decided to try a new theme for the iNODE blog. With wider margins, I’m hoping it will be easier to illustrate posts with snippets of code. Should also allow for slightly larger graphic images when there’s something to illustrate.

Read more »

We received one of the new Intel-based Apple XServe machines the other day and I thought it would be great to build a test VuFind installation just to see how the application scaled on a server-class machine (two 2.66Ghz Woodcrest CPUs with 4 GB memory). I felt that the test database I had been using (300,000+ records) was a strain on a small single CPU desktop machine and beyond seeing that the application worked, I haven’t been able to stretch it with any confidence. I was eager to see what might happen on a faster server with a larger database.

Read more »

Vufind update

Loaded release 0.6 and after a couple of days we now have real-time links to Voyager on the initial display screen and the “holdings” button on an individual record display. Also, thanks to Keiji Suzuki in Ebetsu, Japan, the display of facets is now working for IE7 users.

http://zoombox.gmu.edu/vufind

The current testbed has just over 365,000 records. I hope to build a new test database with 500,000+ records early next week—have to take a couple days off at the end of this week so it will have to wait.

Wikiscanner

This is an interesting Web 2.0 tool. Developed by Virgil Griffith, this utility tracks Wikipedia article edits from unregistered accounts back to their originating IP addresses–which can show their organizational affliation.

This is important (and entertaining) information for those of us that rely on Wikipedia.

http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/

Virgil’s motto for Wikiscanner? Creating minor public relations disasters, one company at a time.

Work continues on the VuFind alternative OPAC. I’m finally making some progress on the part that’s been so frustrating—setting up a real-time link between our VuFind catalog and our Voyager system.

VuFind builds its database using MARC records that are extracted from Voyager (click here for the scripts I use to dump the records), converted to XML (thank you Yaz), then indexed by Solr. It then relies on a real-time link back to Voyager to get the shelf-location and circulation information that isn’t stored in the MARC record.

It’s been two steps forward, one step back but I’m getting used to it.

Read more »