[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] ***SPAM*** A more "academic" item details page - for Evergreen 1.6

[Dan Scott]

I sat down with my fellow Evergreen geeks from Project Conifer and
bashed out a rough draft of an item details page that (I think) better
suits academic institutions. We put the new BibTemplate support that
Mike Rylander coded up to good use and added the display of a bunch of
additional fields:

  * Alternate title (246), ISSN (022), General notes (500), Content
notes (505), Use restriction notes (506), Performer notes (511),
Additional authors (700), Preceded by (780), Succeeded by (785)

It also features a few niceties that any Evergreen site might want to adopt:
  * We replaced the publication info with the full text of the 260
field instead (so publishers will usually display a place and date,
which makes academics happier when they're citing things). This also
let us hide the separate publication date row entirely.
  * To avoid a lengthy set of empty table rows, most fields will be
hidden if they do not contain any content
  * We extended the example hierarchical display of subjects to pull
from all 65X fields, rather than just the 650 (using the fancy ^= CSS3
selector operator - w00t)
  * We made the display of URIs work more like the way online
resources have traditionally been displayed (display subfield z as the
link text if you have no subfield y to display)

We liked the results of the rough draft so much that we immediately
put it into production.

Our current draft of the item details page is at
http://svn.open-ils.org/trac/ILS-Contrib/browser/conifer/trunk/web/opac/skin/default/xml/rdetail/rdetail_summary.xml

Some examples:
  * A journal with a preceding title:
http://laurentian.concat.ca/opac/en-CA/skin/lul/xml/rdetail.xml?r=589790
  * A page with a whole lot of metadata to display:
http://laurentian.concat.ca/opac/en-CA/skin/lul/xml/rdetail.xml?r=738895

So, there are still some bits to refine - we don't really want to
display numeric subfields in most cases, and we probably need to to a
better job of handling really lengthy displays - and undoubtedly there
are more fields to add, but I thought it would be worthwhile pointing
out what is possible in Evergreen 1.6 and thank Mike for putting the
piece in place that makes building highly customized item displays
easy for mere mortals. (Thanks too to Bill Erickson for making
BibTemplate work on Internet Explorer!)

-- 
Dan Scott
Laurentian University