A serendipity of clouds

Insipired by the BBC Radio 1 tag cloud mentioned by Richard Wallis on the Panlibus blog, I quickly threw a couple together for the most recent search keywords used on our OPAC:

https://library.hud.ac.uk/perl/ajax5.pl

https://library.hud.ac.uk/perl/ajax5b.pl
The pages use Ajax and should automatically refresh with updated content every few seconds (assuming that someone has been searching the OPAC recently).
No points for guessing that the larger the font, the more times the word has been used in recent searches!

More Ajax goodness

I’ve spent the afternoon Ajax-ing the “did you mean?” code on the OPAC, and also finishing off the serendipity suggestions.
The serendipity suggestions take longer to generate than before, as the the code now considers keyword phrases returned by answers.com, instead of just single keywords.  As an example, here’s what appears if I try searching for the film “Faraway, So Close” on our OPAC:

Obviously the suggestion of searching for “Close Faraday” is of little use.  However, most of the serendipity suggestions are relevant to the film, and at least two of them will lead me straight through to the catalogue page for “Der Himmel über Berlin” (the prequel to “Faraway, So Close”).
One rather cool outcome of this is that our OPAC can now sometimes answer questions!  Sadly the results don’t always lead to relevant items, but at least our OPAC knows the answer to the Ultimate Question!