New Features in "Mango" the State University Libraries of Florida's Discovery Layer

From: Joshua Greben <jgreben_at_nyob>
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:58:41 -0400
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
(Please excuse cross-posting)
-------------------------------------

The latest iteration of the State University Libraries of Florida's  
Endeca-based catalogs has several new features to check out:

- List function links with icons on all of the brief records to add to  
a temporary folder, print, email, and save records to a text file,  
export to RefWorks.
- Google book cover thumbnails!

The State University Libraries of Florida are collectively using  
Endeca as an alternative online catalog for our Aleph 500 system. We  
have one instance of Endeca that we use for a union catalog with 11  
subsets for the individual university catalogs. We extract the  
separate catalog files from Aleph, merge them into a 12th Aleph  
instance, de-duplicate the records using the OCLC number and merge  
specific fields to make a composite that we feed into Endeca. Using  
our custom-built front end (which we call "Mango" to help our users  
distinguish our development from what comes with the Endeca product),  
we provide a union catalog and 11 individual OPAC views. Here is the  
link to illustrate:

http://catalog.fcla.edu/

This is the Combined Catalog of the State University Libraries of  
Florida with links to the individual catalogs at the top. As you will  
see, the headers and style sheets are specific to each university.

Other stuff unique to this project includes a lot of what we do with  
data loading: record merging and the import of holdings data, and our  
use of Endeca's Thesaurus tool to help retrieve records with words  
that include diacritics without having to enter those characters. For  
an example, see this search in the University of Florida's catalog:

http://uf.catalog.fcla.edu/uf.jsp?Ntt=amphitheatres&Ntk=Keyword&N=20&Nty=1

Other interesting things to look for in our catalogs include:

-– Display of item information in real-time, including circulation  
availability status.
–- Patron Empowerment features, including a list of current loans, the  
ability to renew items, and place hold requests
–- SFX Contextual links for materials with Full Text
–- Advanced Search and limits
–- RSS for Result Set
–- A Permalink for single full records
–- MARC Views of the records

Please take a look at our catalogs and feel free to provide us with a  
lot of feedback!

Joshua Greben
Systems Librarian/Analyst
Florida Center for Library Automation
5830 NW 39th Ave, Gainesville, FL 32606
jgreben_at_ufl.edu
352-392-9020 ext 246
Received on Thu Apr 17 2008 - 11:46:24 EDT