Support for III scope-like functionality?
My library is using III Millennium. We recently put a huge amount of time and money into implementing the scoping feature. We use scoping to separate our library's records from the records of a partner library with 30+ branches. But we also use scoping to separately search dissertations, newspapers, serials and e-resources. All of the scope definitions are defined using location codes.
I'm assuming that Locum will not know anything about the scope definitions that III has set up. How difficult do you think it will be to mimic the scoping when I search in Locum? The most important aspect would be to consistently weed out our partner library's records when searching. But other considerations would be speed and ease of set-up.
Thank you for developing such a terrific product!
meimore,
Two things. First, I'm planning on implementing multi-branch functionality in locum and SOPAC as a separate issue from scoping. It's not a large project to do that, but because Darien Library is one branch, I'll probably need to work with other multi-branch libraries to get that done.
Second, Locum allows you to build 'collections' based on location code. So, in effect, the ability to do scoping is native to Locum and achieved via the configuration file. Furthermore, you can add as many as you like. In your case, you would be able to create one large collection for all of your branch materials. That would be your default search collection. You could then create as many smaller collections as you need. So to answer your question, Locum does its own "scoping" and has no limit on the number of scopes you can define.
John,
Thank you for elaborating on the 'collection' concept. I hope you don't mind a few more questions...
Is there an example of a collection operating on the Darien site? Would there be any performance issues associated with having a collection which was defined by a long list of location codes?
Does searching a specific collection in SOPAC give you the same ability to stay "in-scope", i.e. if I'm searching Dissertations and do another search or click on something in a faceted browse, will my results still be limited to dissertations?
Is there a way to hide certain collections from the public or, better yet, not harvest them at all?
Thanks,
-Morgan
Morgan,
We have three collections, "Adult", "Children" and "Darien Historical Society". All three of which were scopes in Millennium. You can see how they operate by going to http://www.darienlibrary.org/catalog and using the advanced search feature.
You will stay 'in-scope' as long as you continue to use advanced search, though I can see the case being made for the simple search to do the same. Hm.. I'll have to ponder on that. You will stay in-scope if you narrow your search using the faceted search panel. Feel free to play around with it and let me know what you think. Any feedback is very appreciated.
Not harvesting certain records is not something I had anticipated the need for, though you could certainly do that by making a small change to the harvesting code in your ILS connector. Locum also allows you to create custom parameters that could be used to hide certain collections by using a sopac sub module. Are you thinking of just harvesting the records for your branch?
John,
Thanks for the pointer to the collections in the Darien catalog. I confess, I do find it confusing as a user that when I'm doing an advanced search, the search box on the results page defaults to simple search and appears to retain my search terms but if I modify my search in the simple search box, I lose the collection I chose in advanced in the beginning.
Is there a reason collection is only accessible via advanced search? Is not offering collection under "Fine-tune" a choice or is it due to a limitation in the system? Is there a difference between "Children" as a collection and "Children" as a location (which is offered under "Fine-tune")?
Is it true that most of the above is the specifics of how Darien designed their implementation of SOPAC and that we could build our own Drupal blocks to search however we want?
I'm thinking I should probably give this a rest until you have a chance to get to the project specific documentation :) Either that, or just jump in and see for myself!
Yes, we would only want to harvest the records from our library (~1M), not our partner's records (~250K).
-Morgan
I had wanted the basic search form to be as simple as possible. Of course, anyone with some basic Drupal module-writing chops could create a SOPAC sub-module that takes advantage of hook_form_alter to create a custom form. But you're right, you lose your collection limiter if you go back to a basic search--I'm not quite happy with how that behaves...
WRT the Children's collection, you've caught the fact that we need to re-think our location coding. In fact, we're going to re-do the entire location code scheme internally, so yes, there is a location code for "Childrens" and also a collection with the same name.