It turns out that UVA’s reluctance to use the raw MARC data on the search results screen is driven more by processing time than parsing time. Even if they were to start with a fully-parsed MARC object, they’re doing enough screwing around with that data that the bottleneck on their end appears to be all [...]
Author Archives: Bill
Benchmarking MARC record parsing in Ruby
September 17, 2009 – 3:19 pm
[Note: since I started writing this, I found out Bess & Co. store MARC-XML. That makes a difference, since XML in Ruby can be really, really slow]
[UPADTE It turns out they don't use MARC-XML. They use MARC-Binary just like the rest of us. Oops. ]
[UP-UPDATE Well, no, they do use MARC-XML. I'm not afraid to [...]
Building a solr text filter for normalizing data
August 20, 2009 – 12:57 pm
[Kind of part of a continuing series on our VUFind implementation; more of a sidebar, really.]
In my last post I made the case that you should put as much data normalization into Solr as possible. The built-in text filters will get you a long, long way, but sometimes you want to have specialized code, and [...]
Easy Solr types for library data
August 19, 2009 – 4:19 pm
[Yet another bit in a series about our Vufind installation]
While I’m no longer shocked at the terrible state of our data every single day, I’m still shocked pretty often. We figured out pretty quickly that anything we could do to normalize data as it went into the Solr index (and, in fact, as queries were [...]
Going with and “forking” VUFind
August 19, 2009 – 12:09 am
Note: This is the second in a series I’m doing about our VUFind installation, Mirlyn. Here I talk about how we got to where we are. Next I’ll start looking at specific technologies, how we solved various problems, and generally more nerd-centered stuff.
When the University Library decided to go down the path of an open-source, [...]
Sending unicode email headers in PHP
August 17, 2009 – 3:22 pm
I’m probably the last guy on earth to know this, but I’m recording it here just in case. I’m sending record titles in the subject line of emails, and of course they may be unicode. The body takes care of itself, but you need to explicitly encode a header like “Subject.”
$headers['To'] = $to; [...]
Rolling out UMich’s “VUFind”: Introduction and New Features
August 14, 2009 – 12:56 pm
For the last few months, I’ve been working on rolling out a ridiculous-modified version of Vufind, which we just launched as our primary OPAC, Mirlyn, with a slightly-different version powering catalog.hathitrust.org, a temporary metadata search on the HathiTrust data until the OCLC takes it over at some undetermined date.
(Yeah, the HathiTrust site is a lot [...]
Sending MARC(ish) data to Refworks
May 11, 2009 – 10:48 am
Refworks has some okish documentation about how to deal with its callback import procedure, but I thought I’d put down how I’m doing it for our vufind install (mirlyn2-beta.lib.umich.edu) in case other folks are interested.
The basic procedure is:
Send your user to a specific refworks URL along with a callback URL that [...]
MARC-HASH: The saga continues (now with even less structure)
April 15, 2009 – 2:55 pm
After a medium-sized discussion on #code4lib, we’ve collectively decided that…well, ok, no one really cares all that much, but a few people weighed in.
The new format is: A list of arrays. If it’s got two elements, it’s a control field; if it’s got four, it’s a data field.
SO….it’s like this now.
{ "type" : "marc-hash", "version" [...]
MARC-HASH control field, now with less structure
April 15, 2009 – 11:23 am
Why do I ever, ever think that MARC might not rely on order? I don’t know.
In any case, control fields will now be just an array of duples:
control: [ ['001', 'value of the 001'], ['006', 'value of the 006'] ['006', 'another 006'] }