December 9, 2009

Borrow Direct - a rapid book request and delivery service for faculty, staff and students of Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale is moving to a next-generation software platform to be provided by Relais International and Index Data. Borrow Direct allows patrons to search across the member library catalogs simultaneously and request circulating items directly from any partner library.

Sebastian Hammer presented a keynote address at this year’s Code4Lib conference in which he discusses the challenges facing libraries and librarianship from the Internet itself and from ‘competing’ services. A video of the whole talk can be seen here, courtesy of the hosts, Brown University.

We have been continuing to enhance Pazpar2 at a rapid pace. This new release is available as source and packaged for Ubuntu and Debian Changes since last release:

Command search takes two optional parameters, startecs and maxrecs, that specifies the start offset (0, 1, ...) and maximum number of records to fetch for each target.

XSLTs + MARC maps are cached within a session so we don't re-parse them over and over again.

A new release of Pazpar2 is available. It's been awhile, and we have some important new functionality to share.

• Pazpar2 can now access SRU and SRW targets in addition to Z39.50 ones. This is all thanks to the YAZ ZOOM implementation, which has also brought about significant simplifications to the code.

• It is now possible to use Pazpar2 with record merging disabled entirely for situations where merging is not appropriate.

• Original records from each target are stored in the result set and can be accessed from the client code if necessary.