[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Looking for financial partners to develop OPAC auto-suggest feature

[Yamil Suarez]

Hello,

My library has started working with ESI to develop an auto-suggest search feature for the EG OPAC for a future version of EG. This development is inspired by the auto-suggest features from UNC Chapel Hill Libraries OPAC.

Here is their auto-suggest in action...
http://search.lib.unc.edu/

We first heard of this OPAC feature implementation when UNC wrote about it in a Code4Lib article in 2010, where they describe their architecture in general detail. 

Here is the Code4Lib article on their original design (which has been tweaked since then)...
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/3022

The UNC system is mostly composed of a couple of java servlets (Java 6) on Tomcat v6, some jQuery code, and a Solr 1.4 backend, but ESI plans to use technologies and APIs that are already being used in the EG "stack" or provided by EG/OSRF.

For the record, the killer feature of their implementation for my library, is that the right side of their automatic suggestions there are labels for each suggestion if it is an author, subject, series, or title. In a Berklee implementation we would like it to also label song titles.

Please contact me if you would like to partner with us to finance this development or offer feedback.

Thanks,
Yamil