Nice.
I played around with using an autocomplete feature to search for electronic journals from our catalog. The index supplying the suggestions is a list of electronic journals from our catalog. I used the same jQuery plugin you did; you can find it here:
http://www.lib.umich.edu/labs/ejfinder/index2.html
It uses the Mirlyn API<http://webservices.itcs.umich.edu/mediawiki/MLibraryAPI/index.php/Mirlynapi:Home> to fetch the links to the journals from our catalog.
I was inspired by/copying a feature offered by Ex Libris in one of their products; here's Michigan Tech's implementation of it: http://www.lib.mtu.edu/eresources/eressearch/ejournals.aspx
I also made one to search for DVDs in our Media Library. That one's here:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dfulmer/api/dvd.html
The index supplying the suggestions is a list of DVD titles I pulled from our catalog using the Mirlyn API. A search for a film title uses the Mirlyn API, and your new friend jsonp, to get back a summary of the film and availability information. This was radical when I did it because our OPAC required so many clicks to find out if something was checked out, but it's kind of obsolete since the coming of Mirlyn2 Beta<http://mirlyn2-beta.lib.umich.edu/>, our next generation catalog which has inlining of more extensive, real-time availability information in search results.
David Fulmer
University of Michigan Library
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Mike Cunningham
Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2009 12:31 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: [NGC4LIB] opac live search
I thought someone on this list might be interested in this. I now have a
proof of concept running on our staging port of an autocomplete/live
search feature for the opac. You may have seen this type of feature on
sites like Amazon or Zip.ca. It comes back with different results
depending on which search field the user selects (title, keyword,
author, subject, call number). Since there is no keyword index per se,
keyword also uses the title index. The feature kicks in after the user
has typed at least 3 characters.
I'm curious if anyone knows of other library catalogues that do
something like this. Someone pointed out to me that BiblioCommons has a
feature like this. Does anyone know of others?
You can try it out here:
http://search.cambridgelibraries.ca:2082/search
There is some background info on the feature here:
http://ex-libris.ca/?p=694
Mike
--
Mike Cunningham
Web Services Librarian
Cambridge Libraries
Received on Wed Feb 18 2009 - 16:21:38 EST