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Informational

Support for Koha and SOPAC

» Submitted by jblyberg on Wed, 04/29/2009 - 11:14am

BibLibre's Nicolas Morin gave a presentation last week called "SOPAC: Connecting Drupal and Koha" where he talks about BibLibre's experience with SOPAC and getting a Locum conector to work with Koha. Check it out:

sopac : connecting koha and drupal
View more presentations from nicomo.

Support

SOPAC has a small but growing user base and developer community. In general, this site and the SOPAC project page on drupal.org should be your primary resource for help and support. There are several other options listed here as well.

Getting Started

If you are interested in evaluating SOPAC, Locum, or Insurge, a good place to start would be the Getting Started guide which will walk you through the installation and configuration of the various SOPAC components.

Forums

Several online forums are hosted here and may contain answers to many frequently asked questions. If you don't find and answer in there, feel free to post your question. Most forum queries are answered fairly quickly.

IRC

The SOPAC project uses the freenode IRC server network and occupies the channel #sopac. You can use this channel to ask questions or to hang out with other SOPAC users and developers.

Contact Me

In general, you should ask questions in the forum, but if you need to contact me, you can do that in a number of ways.

Documentation

All official SOPAC documentation can be found in the documentation section of this site.

Issue Tracker

The SOPAC project page on drupal.org features a built-in issue tracker. If you feel you have found a bug or would like to make a feature request, that would be the place to do it.

Commercial Support

Oregon-based CraftySpace currently implements and supports SOPAC through their YourLibrarySite.com service.

BibLibre, a French company, is also involved with SOPAC. They are familiar with the implementation and operation of SOPAC.

Contact Me

SOPAC, Locum, and Insurge are written and maintained by John Blyberg and supported by the Darien Library in Darien, Connecticut.

John Blyberg
http://www.blyberg.net/
http://www.darienlibrary.org/
jblyberg@darienlibrary.org

Mailing Address
Darien Library
1441 Post Rd.
Darien, CT 06820

Phone
203-669-5222

What are SOPAC, Locum, and Insurge?

What is SOPAC?

SOPAC (Social Online Public Access Catalog) is a module for the Drupal CMS that provides true integration of your library catalog system with the power of the Drupal content management system while allowing users to tag, rate, and review your holdings. User input is then incorporated into the discovery index so that SOPAC becomes a truly community-driven catalog system. Other features include:

  • Faceted browsing
  • Ajax-empowered interface with native jQuery support
  • 100% customizable interface via the Drupal template system
  • Ability to remove search limiters
  • Saved searches
  • Integrated renewals, holds placement, and fine payment
  • Ability to customize the user experience via the administrative control panel
  • Ability to create custom functionality via a Drupal sub-module

Because SOPAC depends on Locum to connect to your integrated library system, it has the potential to work with any ILS.

What is Locum?

Locum is a PHP software library that does two things:

First, it creates an abstraction layer between your ILS and any PHP application you wish to build on top of it. 'Connector' pieces can be developed so that Locum will operate with any ILS. This will allow application developers to write programs that will work in any library running locum, regardless of what ILS they are using.

Second, Locum provides a bibliographic discovery layer and interface to the open source full-text indexing engine Sphinx. This gives Locum the power to not only provide an open transactional interface with your ILS, but a very powerful, external index of your holdings an open RDBMS--MySQL.

What is Insurge?

Insurge allows developers to associate interactive social data with bibliographic records. You could say that Insurge puts the "S" in SOPAC. It provides the programmatic mechanism and social storage facility to any application built on top of it.

Insurge also allows developers to harness the power of a repository of social data that can be imported via Locum and displayed via applications like SOPAC to bolster local bibliographic social data sets.

Where can I see it in action?

You can see SOPAC in action by visiting the following library catalogs:

BibLibre also has a demo installation, using French translation and the internationalization support they developed.

How do I get it?

You get it all here! Visit the downloads section to get started.

How much does it cost?

It's free and open sourced! SOPAC, Locum, and Insurge are all licensed under the GNU Public License v3.

Where do I get support?

Thesocialopac.net is a site dedicated to building an open source community around the project. You can start by reading the online documentation and talk with other users and developers in the forums.

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