Mobile OPAC

• 

  Posted by Alevtina Verbovetskaya (she/her) on December 3, 2012 at 4:33 pm

  Hi guys,

  As promised, here are screenshots of the mobile interface to the Aleph web OPAC that the Office of Library Services is working on. It is in the alpha stage and we are aiming for a late-December 2012 beta release, which is when all the campus librarians will have a chance to look at the interface, perform some searches, log in as users, request books, renew items, etc. Since this is a “stripped down” version of the catalog, users will not have 100% of the capabilities of the desktop version but they will enjoy all of the basic (and, indeed, most frequently utilized) services in a mobile-friendly environment.

  @szweib If you’d like to share what you’re working on, please do so!

  Thanks!
  Allie

  —
  Edited on 12/04/12 to remove the link to the live demo. The staff of OLS will wait until an official announcement of the beta release is made before distributing the link with the wider CUNY community. Thanks for understanding and apologies for the confusion!

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• Stephen Zweibel

  Member

  December 3, 2012 at 5:22 pm

  Hello all,

  It was great to meet all of you today at the LACUNY Mobile Roundtable. I am glad to finally be able to put faces with the names I have seen on emails and forum posts.

  Allie, you’ve done great work on your mobile catalog, especially with integrating student accounts.

  But, because you asked, here’s my version, also ALPHA, hosted on my home server:
  http://108.176.144.195/CUNYplusmobile/AngularClient/

  Currently it shows results for Hunter College only, though I will change that tomorrow.

  As for the middle-man catalog API: I have now put the API up ‘in the cloud’, on a Heroku instance. A basic search would look like this:
  http://mighty-wildwood-7308.herokuapp.com/search?query=hopes&queryType=All+Fields&page=1&alephCookie=&scanStart=

  The link above returns a JSONified set of the first page of results from the catalog from a search for ‘hopes’. To get the second page of results (and beyond) you need to pass back Aleph’s cookie to the server, supplied as part of the JSON, labelled ‘alephCookie’.

  http://mighty-wildwood-7308.herokuapp.com/details?docNumber=007256383&library=HC001
  This returns the holdings data for doc number 007256383, The Nun. It is similarly possible to get the entire parsed MARC record from the catalog, though at the moment it’s more complicated than I’d prefer.

  I believe there are many opportunities in data-mining our catalog, and I’m looking forward to presenting on the possibilities in the meeting a couple months from now. In the meantime, if any of you have questions on the use of the API, or wish to discuss the potential CUNY+ Mobile Catalog(s), please feel free to get in contact with me!

  Thanks,
  Steve
  Stephen Klein

  Member

  December 3, 2012 at 5:24 pm

  @SZ =>hope you can present soon. Let me know when you want to present, and i can install node.js on a workstation or server, if needed.

  Thanks!
  Beth Evans

  Participant

  December 4, 2012 at 1:32 pm

  @Allie & @StephenZ – Can we share opac mobile links with our colleagues on our campuses?
  Alevtina Verbovetskaya (she/her)

  Participant

  December 4, 2012 at 4:16 pm

  @bethevans The public beta will soon be released and OLS will seek input from the campus librarians at that time. So hang on a little bit longer! Everyone will get a chance to see the mobile OPAC before it goes live 🙂
  Stephen Zweibel

  Member

  December 5, 2012 at 12:27 am

  @bethevans You are welcome to share my link, though again I don’t want to step over any official app.
  Beth Evans

  Participant

  December 6, 2012 at 12:41 pm

  Thanks @szweib!