Hi folks,
Thanks very much for your help so far on getting Emilda running. I've
handed over the installation to our librarian (the installation is for a
small library at my church), and we'll see how things go from here.
There are a few things i'd like to do with Emilda that i haven't found a
way of doing yet. If there is a way to do them, i'd love to hear about
it. I'm an IT manager, not a librarian, and definitely not a MARC or
Z39.50 geek, so pardon my ignorance when it comes to these things. The
library software i've worked with previously is Softlink Alice, and
Bookmark. Both of these, in my opinion, offer a better "out of the box"
experience than Emilda does currently, but i can see that changing in
the near future...
If these are features that aren't available, some pointers/suggestions
before i go away and start hacking would be good. ;-) All of my
experience is based on the current stable Debian packages provided by
David Everly. If i'd be better to start with the code in CVS, please
let me know (although mixing David's packages and CVS could get a bit
messy).
Here's my list:
1. Provide search-only access without authenticating. This would be
really helpful for casual searchers.
2. Subject (MARC record type 653) on the add/edit book screens. The
data is definitely coming in from the Z39.50 servers i have defined,
because if i look in /var/lib/idzebra/emilda/records, i can see the
data. However, there are no fields for it on those screens.
3. Book covers or picture excerpts. This is a wish list item, but it's
amazing how important this is for young borrowers. I expect it could be
easily achieved through an ISBN link to Barnes & Noble or Amazon.
4. Browsing by subject area. It would be nice to be able to just look
through a short description of certain subject areas or Dewey ranges.
If you're doing academic research, this is nothing short of essential.
5. Self-service borrowing. As it stands, you need to have an
administrative user check books out and in. It would be nice if you
could start Emilda in a "kiosk" mode where search and self check in and
out were available.
6. I'm sure i could find this out if i looked hard enough through the
documentation, but it would be really nice if it were easy to set up a
Z39.50 server based on my Emilda/Zebra installation so that other
libraries could share our bibliographic information. I've configured a
list of about 15 Z39.50 servers, most at major universities, and there
are still some academic books on my home bookshelf that are not
available in any of their catalogues. I'd like to be able to make a
contribution to the community by sharing the catalogues that i do have.
7. Another point related to unauthenticated browsing: it would be nice
to be able to do regular synchronisation from one Emilda installation to
another, or from another library package to Emilda in an automated
fashion. Then people who don't want to publicly expose their main
library system could still allow web and Z39.50 searches. I'm guessing
that this is a non-trivial exercise, but if i get a chance during my
hacking, i might try to write some starter scripts for this.
8. It's not clear to me what is necessary to duplicate for a disaster
recovery copy of Emilda. It might be nice to have this information
collected in one place.
I'm sure i'll come up with more issues over the next few weeks. I look
forward to reading your responses.
--
Paul
<http://paulgear.webhop.net>
--
Did you know? It is illegal to use your copy of Microsoft Office on
multiple computers without multiple licenses. Why not try the free
alternative OpenOffice.org? <http://www.openoffice.org>
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