MyLibrary

MyLibrary can be used to create a simple library catalog. See:

http://mylibrary.library.nd.edu/demos/catalog/

The process is not too difficult:

1. Acquire the set of MARC records used to describe your library’s content.
2. Use something like MARC::Record to loop through the records extracting bibliographic information.
3. Map the bibliographic information to Dublin Core elements.
4. Store the Dublin Core elements in MyLibrary.
5. Along the way, examine the values of controlled vocabulary terms such as names and subjects and create facet/term combinations while linking them to individual MyLibrary records.
6. Go to Step #2 until done.

Now that the content has been ingested, create sets of reports against your MyLibrary database. One report you will use to make your database browsable. For example, loop through each the the terms in your collection creating browsable lists of names and subjects. Another report will make your database searchable. Loop through each record in your database and feed them to an indexer such as KinoSearch or Lucene.

A library catalog with MyLibrary will not be perfect. For example, MyLibrary resource attributes are limited to a small superset of Dublin Core; MyLibrary does not support the fine distinction between authors, editors, corporate authors, etc. Second, MyLibrary dates are in the form of DD-MM-YYYY. When reading your MARC records you will need to normalize your dates to this format and quite possibly make up dates. Otherwise the years you insert into MyLibrary will simply go to Big Byte Heaven.

Tags: Demonstrations //