TIS Lab

Recent Arrivals

We’ve launched our Recent Arrivals app, which features any item that’s been added to the catalog in the past 30 days along with any item that is on a designated new book shelf in a branch library.

Users have the option to filter these results by branch location, material type, and language. Results can be sorted by title or date added to the catalog. Any search combination, which can be defined as narrowly as Italian DVDs at the Fine Arts Library, can be saved as an RSS feed.

We intend this to be a new discovery tool which aids in browsing our enormous collection. The Millennium Catalog excels at searching for known authors, titles, or keywords. This is geared toward the student or faculty member who is interested in seeing new acquisitions in a particular branch or language.

Several of the branch libraries have been keeping manual lists of new materials on their sites. The new application can be incorporated into any branch site so that it only shows new materials for a single location. An example of a branch library already taking advantage of this can be found at the recently-redesigned Fine Arts Library. We hope we can incorporate the new app into other branch pages and free up our busy staff for other duties.

Some of the morphing the project took over the its course:

• Initially it was going to be only for new books but we identified the need to represent all materials
• Choosing an application name proved difficult (New Items? New Books & More?) and Recent Arrivals was decided by a bibliographer vote
• We identified early on the importance of showing an item’s availability status in our results, rather than requiring users to click through to the catalog to see if it could be checked out. We were able to accomplish this via MAJAX an AJAX module for the Millennium catalog.

One randomly-selected recent arrival is currently being highlighted in a homepage feature each time the page loads.

Homepage Feature

Just saw that LibraryThing has launched their free cover images.  As they say in the page, they don’t necessarily have as many covers as some other services or as many options in the image api.  However, they ARE free and available under fewer restrictions than those other services.

Here’s the announcement

The University of Texas Libraries just launched a new reviews feature in our Library Catalog. We used Wordpress to create a blog that stores all of the reviews. By using the TDO Mini Forms plugin for Wordpress, we were able to provide a way for users to submit content to the blog. Each user-submitted posts goes through a moderation process where they are approved or rejected by someone at the library. Then, using a bit of Javascript and PHP, we were able to embed the reviews within an iframe in our library catalog. Click here for an example.

Hopefully our users will find this new feature to be a useful addition to the information provided in the catalog.

We turned on LibraryThing for Libraries in our III OPAC on Monday.  It is a relatively simple javascript plugin that is added to the bib_display.  We uploaded a file to their server with a list of our ISBNs and now when there is a match, the plugin enables 3 possible features.  Depending on whether there is data for the title you are viewing, you will see recommended titles, other editions and translations and a tag browser from tags associated to the item by LibraryThing users.  All links presented by the plug-in take you to other items in your own catalog.

If you are curious about LTFL, here is their FAQ.

We had the chance to add the new Google Book Search Viewability API to the library catalog and we took it. It uses javascript to show a link from our full records if those items exist in Google Book Search. The link will appear if the item has either full text of a limited preview. We decided not to display the link if the item only has a minimal record there.

You can see a limited preview link here.