Loughborough Online Reading List System
Archive for December, 2009
e-Learning Showcase
14 Dec 2009
by Gary Brewerton
in LORLS
Spent a large part (11am-3pm) of today at an e-Learning showcase on campus. One of our Academic Librarians and I were there to demonstrate the new version of the reading list system to academics and support staff. Unfortunately the space provided for the poster session was far from ideal which meant that we got to meet very few people and more importantly was some distance away from the mince pies and mulled wine.
However whilst the quantity was low the quality of visitors was high. Of particular interest to the academics was the drag-and-drop reorder of lists and the ability to import bibliographic data from random websites. The latter being Jason’s new BibGrab tool.
Another positive from the event was the plate of mince pies I got for holding a couple of doors open for the catering staff when they were clearing up at the end. I must remember to share these with the rest of the team…
BibGrab Proof Of Concept
11 Dec 2009
One tool on our list of things required for LORLS v6 is BibGrab for which we have just finished the proof of concept. It finds ISBNs and ISSNs from web pages and looks up their metadata on COPAC.
The main piece of functionality missing from the proof of concept is the ability to actually add an item to a reading list. As well adding this functionality we are also aiming to make it pick up details about the web page it was initiated on so that staff can add web pages to their reading lists.
While the current source to used to lookup metadata is hard coded, the release version should have a number of sources to it can use and an order of preference for them. This way the metadata will match that of the local LMS if it has a matching record and only try other sources if it doesn’t.