Nice threads

I have been working on Fancy-Pants quite a bit in the last couple of weeks. This is an AJAX layer over Voyager’s WebVoyage — an attempt to de-suck-ify its interface a bit. Why is it called Fancy-Pants? Well, Voyager still has the same underwear, it’s just got a new set of britches.

There are two main problems that it’s trying to solve:

1. For items that have more than one MFHD, WebVoyage won’t show any item information in the title list.
2. We wanted to link to 856 URLs from the title list.

Now, we’re already doing the second one, but it’s not implemented particularly well. While we were solving those problems, we wanted to see what we could do about that god-awful table based display.

I took NCSU’s Endeca layout as the baseline template for what I wanted the results to look like. Right now, Fancy-Pants can only be accessed via this Greasemonkey script [get Greasemonkey here]. Greasemonkey, of course, wouldn’t be a requirement, but we’re using it to inject the initial javascript call since we’re having to work on a live system.

For the title list screen, the javascript is looping through the bib ids on the page (it grabs them from the ‘save record’ checkboxes) and sends them to a Ruby on Rails app that queries Voyager’s Oracle database and builds a new result set. The javascript hides the original page results (display: none) and inserts a div with the new results. If there are multiple 856es or locations, the result has expanding/collapsing divs to show/hide them.

I send the query terms to Yahoo’s spell check API and will return a link to any suggestions it gives. No, this isn’t the ideal, but I’m still in proof-of-concept stage.

Things I still want to do with title list screen are:

1. Come up with a way to show what the item is (journal, microform, map, etc.) — I’ve started on this, but it’s very rough
2. Make the ‘sort by’ dropdown a row of links
3. Turn the ‘Narrow my search’ button/page into a faceted navigation menu with options that make sense for the result set (for instance, limiting language to Dutch, Middle (ca. 1050-1350) isn’t going to come into play that much). Also add some logical facets a la Evergreen
4. Replace the ‘save record’ feature to work during the entire session and be able to save directly to Zotero, Endnote, Bibtex, CiteULike or Connotea.
5. COinS and UnAPI
6. Give it the same style as the rest of our new web design.

I’m currently not doing much with the record view page, but I am adding a direct link to the record.  I plan on integrating Umlaut responses here, as well as other context sensitive items – especially those that don’t conform well to OpenURL requests.

If you were able to install the Greasemonkey script and want to try it out, go to GIL’s keyword search and try:

1. senate hearings — this is a good example of multiple mfhds/856es
2. thomas friedmann — a good example of “Did you mean”

Also try a journal search for “Nature”.  Then try whatever floats your boat and let me know how it worked.  If you notice that it’s really slow, this is actually because of Voyager.  The “Available online” and relevance icons are all rendered dynamically and they just grind the output to a halt.  When we go live with this, we’d disable those features in WebVoyage to speed things up.
Fancy-pants is by no means a final product.  I view this as a bridge between what we have and an upcoming Solr based catalog interface.  The Solr catalog will still need to interface with Voyager, so Fancy-pants would transition to that.  Ultimately, I would like this whole process to eventually lead to the Communicat.