I have a confession to make — I grew bored of Twitter after a couple of days. However, I felt obliged to keep on Twittering something… anything… so I hooked our OPAC into the feed instead. Every 5 minutes, a bit of code checks to see what the most popular keyword(s) used on our OPAC [...]
Posts under ‘Horizon/HIP’
Another one bites the dust — RIP SirsiDynix EPS Rooms
Wow — looks like another flagship SirsiDynix product has been shelved. According to reports from attendees at the SuperConference, the company is dropping Stephen Abram's beloved EPS Rooms product. Never mind, "shift happens". At the conference, the company also announced their version of Primo/Encore (branded "Enterprise"). Curiously, this will be a SaaS only offering. RSS [...]
Congratulations "City of God" DVD!
Sitting in the Short Loan collection in the main library at the University of Huddersfield, it doesn't really stand out as been any different to the other DVDs near it, but our copy of "City of God" is officially the most borrowed item from our entire collection (which is nearly 400,000 items) in the last [...]
Ooops – did I just delete the LMS database?
I'm always wary of doing bulk changes to the bibliographic records via SQL, so I tend to be fairly cautious. Anyway, we'd got nearly 100,000 bib records that need rejiggering (ISBN in the wrong field), so I knocked up a Perl script to do the deed. After it had changed a few hundred records, I [...]
Spot the difference
Here's a recent statement from SirsiDynix… “The Horizon 7.4.1 and HIP 3.09/4.13 releases are clear evidence that SirsiDynix remains committed to the Horizon platform,†said Gary Rautenstrauch, SirsiDynix CEO. “While SirsiDynix Symphony is our flagship platform for the future, SirsiDynix will continue to upgrade the Horizon platform for the next four to six years. “This [...]
International Survey of Library Automation
Marshall Breeding has published the results of the "Perceptions 2007: An International Survey of Library Automation" and I doubt they'll make comfortable reading at SirsiDynix HQ (unless Scribe has got it right!)… The products of SirsiDynix, Unicorn and Horizon, received low satisfaction scores from libraries responding to the survey. Unicorn, the company’s flagship ILS performed [...]
OPAC keyword cloud
This is crying out to be done like the visual word map in AquaBrowser, but here's a browseable tag cloud based on data from nearly 2 million keyword searches on our OPAC. The code looks for other keywords that were entered as part of the same search (e.g. "ethics of nursing care") to draw out [...]
(Hopefully) coming soon — HIPpie
In the last couple of months, I've had several email exchanges with Dynix & Horizon libraries who were interested in using some of the "2.0" features that I've added to our OPAC at Huddersfield, but the technical challenges (setting up an extra web server, MySQL database, etc) would have been too much. I've been thinking [...]
Twittering the OPAC
I noticed that a few other people have been blogging about how they're using Twitter within their own library, so here's how I've been (ab)using my Twitter feed… http://twitter.com/daveyp Last year, I set up some data feeds from the library that our students could hook into for their projects. This data includes a file listing [...]
If you build it, they'll come back for more!
I'm just busy putting together slides for some of the upcoming presentations and I thought it was about time I trawled through some of the OPAC usage stats to see if our students are still using some of the OPAC tweaks we've made. The good news is that they are, and then some more! First [...]