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

[Mary Llewellyn]

Thanks very much. I have my search working on iPage. Title Source should be just as easy.

Mary


-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Scott [mailto:dan at coffeecode.net] 
Sent: Friday, May 27, 2011 11:00 AM
To: mllewell at biblio.org; Evergreen Discussion Group
Subject: Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] ISBN search of local OPAC from a vendor site

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.