Umlaut to work with other journal source?

[Owen Stephens]

If I was interested in layering Umlaut over a different journal source for A-Z lists rather than SFX...

Have others done this already?

Would it be a big task?

Where would I start looking in the code?

Thanks

[PHILLIPS M.E.]

Hi Owen,

 

I’d look round here:

https://github.com/team-umlaut/umlaut/tree/0e574d0107a116b43e9a785c53e994e730ea3d02/app/models/sfx4/abstract

 

There may be other places to look too.  We haven’t tried adapting the Umlaut A-Z lists to work with Millennium here at Durham as we already had reasonably good A-Z lists, but now our Umlaut installation is almost ready to go live, we might think about it, and I very much liked the look of Ronan’s installation.

 

As far as I know we are the only site using Umlaut with anything other than SFX.  Adapting the main link resolver to work with Millennium was not a huge bit of work, but the A-Z lists are much more tied in with the SFX tables, I suspect.

 

Short answer: I don’t really know much about it, I don’t know how hard it would be, but I’m sure other folk would be interested, including ourselves here at Durham.

 

Matthew

 

--

Matthew Phillips

Head of Digital and Bibliographic Services,

Durham University Library, Stockton Road, Durham, DH1 3LY

+44 (0)191 334 2941

 

 

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[Scot Thomas Dalton]

Hi Owen,

Umlaut is very flexible when it comes to using different sources for its A-Z lists.

At NYU, we use SFX as the source of the data but index that data in Solr, so Umlaut uses Solr, rather than SFX.

How big of a task it is would depend on how easy it is to get the list from your journal source.

A few of starting points:

1. The SearchMethods README [1]

2. The SearchController rubydocs [2]

3. The line of the default configuration where the search method is specified [3]

At NYU, we've open sourced our implementation [4], but it may be more confusing than helpful, since it's pretty specific to our needs.

Two last things I'd like to mention:

1. While Umlaut CAN do search, I think there are other tools, like Blacklight, that do it better. Umlaut is very good at service aggregation/link resolution, but not 

necessarily great at robust searching. 

2. I seriously question the use of A-Z lists.  A better use of time may be finding out if users actually use A-Z lists (esp. one with over 150,000 items). For a bit of evidence that users may not use the Umlaut A-Z list, see the paging bug in Umlaut that has been around for a couple of years that nobody reported [5].

Hope this helps.

- Scot

[1] https://github.com/team-umlaut/umlaut/tree/master/app/controllers/search_methods

[2] http://rubydoc.info/github/team-umlaut/umlaut/master/SearchController

[3] https://github.com/team-umlaut/umlaut/blob/master/app/controllers/umlaut_configurable.rb#L163

[4] https://github.com/NYULibraries/getit

[5] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/umlaut-software/OHI2mlQcrJw/8rXAvxntZcUJ

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Scot Dalton
New York University

[Owen Stephens]

Thanks Matthew - have you anything that you could share around the work you've already done to get Umlaut to work with Millennium for it's link resolver functionality?

[Owen Stephens]

Thanks Scott - I'll have a look at those starting points.

I'm also slightly sceptical about A-Z lists but they are often something that library staff or library users ask for ... (not saying whether it is the former or the latter who most often ask for them!)

To be honest at the moment I'm more considering it as a proof-of-concept that might test out an API, than something that would be in production anywhere

Owen