[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] ISBN search of local OPAC from a vendor site

[Dan Scott]

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 10:45 AM, Mary Llewellyn <mllewell at biblio.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Does anyone know how to set up an ISBN search of our OPAC on Title Source or
> iPage, so that when we click on the vendor's "OPAC search" button, it opens
> a browser to the OPAC and executes the search.? Our acq librarians have been
> used to doing that as a check to prevent themselves from ordering a title
> their library already owns. We'd need to search a specific library, not our
> entire catalog. I had it set up for Horizon, but our world is about to
> change.

Yep. Evergreen has had persistent URLs from day one, and you're on
2.0, so you have access to the built-in "identifier|isbn" index. So
you can use the "Advanced" search widget to generate a template ISBN
search URL.

Assuming you're on the home page of the library that you want to search:

1. Do a search, any search (you just want to get to the search results
page, which is one of the only pages that has the advanced search
widget; you don't get the Advanced search widget from the Advanced
search page, rather confusingly).

2. Click the "Advanced" button just below the search box. The "Classed
Searches" search dialogue opens.

3. Change the "Search type" selector from "Title" or "Keyword" or
whatever to "Identifier -- ISBN".

4. Change the search text to an ISBN.

5. Remove any empty search rows.

6. Press Go

7. Take the URL that is generated and locate the ISBN; you can then
replace that with the field of your choice.

For example, in our case:
http://laurentian.concat.ca/opac/en-CA/skin/lul/xml/rresult.xml?rt=title&tp=title&ft=&l=105&d=1&f=&av=&t=identifier|isbn:0131855255

Note that you can use this approach to generate templated URLs for any
kind of search in the drop down.