To take your example of Hamsun’s Sult the uniform title is: Hamsun, Knut, 1859-1952. Sult, and searching this in Worldcat correctly http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=ti%3A%22sult%22+au%3A%22hamsun%2C+knut%22 gives 156 results that the patron can modify by format, other authors, dates, languages, and so on. This list can also be sorted by author, title, date, etc. Other indexes could be created too.

To get this kind of result, of course needs the catalogers to add consistently and correctly the uniform titles. But that is part of their job.

I am quite impressed with the DIVA technology for viewing images seamlessly. I am looking at this DIVA without having tightly coupled with IIP Image server and meta data server.

Please help me to understand, if this is possible so.

Thanks
R Hariharan (Hari)

The most significant change that we’ve recently implemented is at the back-end: we switched from Firefox (which somehow forced itself to upgrade to FF10 even though I’d deliberately installed a legacy version and thought I’d disabled auto-updates) to Opera. Once Firefox was on version 10, the entire interface became phenomenally unresponsive to the point of being almost useless, so the change was quite warranted.

Switching to Opera was pretty easy: there were almost no changes to page rendering other than a couple of acceptable alignment issues, and the whole interface was more responsive and stable than even Firefox 3.6 was. Opera also has really robust built-in kiosk and URL whitelist functionality, as I alluded to in the article. However, now that we’ve spent a few months on Opera, we’ve uncovered a few issues.

After Opera has been running for a long time (read: a couple of weeks), the Flash application that runs the campus bus map starts loading very slowly, and sometimes stops loading altogether. In addition, shutting down and restarting the browser seems to take longer and longer. This came to a head last week when the browser simply wouldn’t restart. A bit of log analysis and some online research suggested a problem with the cache; and lo, when I manually deleted the Opera cache I found that it contained over 5.5 million files. This is despite default caching policies in Opera limiting cache size to 20 megabytes (by my calculations, just the index tables for 5.5 million files is somewhere in the gigabytes in HPFS).

Deleting the cache files fixed the issue and brought back Opera’s zippiness. I also set Opera’s cache limits a little lower, though I don’t think this is the problem. I suspect that what’s happening is related to the Flash application running the campus bus map: my guess is that it uses Opera’s cache directory but maintains its own caching policy; it probably also isn’t so smart about reusing cache files with the same content. I can just imagine an entire new image of all the Flash application’s contents being cached every time someone uses the bus map application. After a few hundred renderings, the cache would be ridiculously bloated.

I haven’t put a permanent fix in place yet, but the solution is pretty simple: regularly delete Opera’s cache manually. I should actually be able to integrate this into the browser restart procedure, since I’m using a script to ensure that Opera starts in kiosk mode. I’ll just prepend a couple of carefully crafted “rm -rf *” commands, and then every time Opera starts it’ll have a squeaky clean cache.

If anyone has questions about Opera kiosk mode or the configuration files I’m using, let me know and I’ll be happy to share them.

I wonder how the well a modular approach would work where each “item type” had it’s own standard identifiers, rather than trying to cram everything into one rule set (which leads to abstract identification). This would compartmentalize the “standardization” to a specific item type and perhaps allow for more direct and clear identification by SMEs of that specific item type.

This may also lead to simplificaiton where libraries would only need to understand the item types they deal with directly.

In the end we’ve all used MARC21 differently to best describe our varied holdings – due to MARC21s “approximate” nature I really don’t see a universal application that will cover all cases. We’ll all have to dig ourselves out of the corner we’ve painted ourselves into with MARC21 and the more we stuff in the worse it gets.

Thanks so much,
Thomas La Foe
tlafoe@library.msstate.edu

Dr S M Rokade
Librarian
ANCA, Anandwan, Warora, MS

One note for new readers: the API base url is currently’http://000-00.xml.open.serialssolutions.com/openurlxml?’, not ‘http://000-00.openurl.xml.serialssolutions.com/openurlxml?’ as described in the code in this article.

Otherwise, thanks so much for this! It’s a straight-forward example!