Modifying Koha for a citation database, or, Hey folks, try this at home!
Esteemed Colleagues, Some of you may be familiar with the MedStar Authors catalog, a Koha instance where I took citations from Medline, the database of medical journal citations run by the US National Library of Medicine and converted them to a format that could be seen and searched in Koha. I was new to Koha when I designed it, I didn't know what I was doing, and there were a lot of rough edges I wanted to polish in a future version. After much longer than I thought it would take, it's now available at http://www.medstarauthors.org. So who would want to set up a Koha instance of local authors from Medline citations other than me?
crickets<
Thought so. However, doing this project involved: Deciding which Medline fields I wanted for the Authors Catalog. Converting Medline citations in Reference Manager format to MARC records. Adding new, non-standard MARC fields to the Koha framework. Editing the OpacResults and OpacDetail xsl files to display the fields I wanted. There are a lot more than in the standard OpacDetail xsl! Adding the new fields to Elasticsearch, and assigning them to indexes so they're searchable. Editing masthead.inc to add more basic search options. (Institution 651$a, Department 656$a, etc.) Editing opac-advsearch.tt to add more search options, and (when you click on "more options") even more search options. Editing opac-facets.inc to modify the left column in the detail view. Making it possible (and easy!) to add PDFs and other files to the Koha server itself. Adding a page to the News function so I can display links to most of the files I've mentioned so far. (needs 22.11) Putting a lot of data into a spreadsheet to keep track of what field is associated with what MARC tag, Elasticsearch index, etc. Anyone working on, and being frustrated by, any of the above? Then you may find some of what I've done worth harvesting, at least to look at to see what I've done. It isn't necessarily pretty--XSLT programmers might need their fainting couches--but it works. At least for this installation. Unfortunately, the site is blocked in some places outside the US, possibly in the EU because our IS department hasn't vetted it for GDPR compliance. (Thanks to David for suggesting the reason.) I think I can put the page with the files on a different server without running afoul of GDPR; I'll do it if anyone's interested. --Fred Fred King, MSLS, AHIP Medical Librarian, MedStar Washington Hospital Center fred.king@medstar.net 202-877-6670 ORCID 0000-0001-5266-0279 MedStar Authors Catalog: http://medstarauthors.org You know it's cold outside when you go outside and it's cold. --NPS Twitter ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MedStar Health is a not-for-profit, integrated healthcare delivery system, the largest in Maryland and the Washington, D.C., region. Nationally recognized for clinical quality in heart, orthopedics, cancer and GI. IMPORTANT: This e-mail (including any attachments) may contain information that is private, confidential, or protected by attorney-client or other privilege. If you received this e-mail in error, please delete it from your system without copying it and notify sender by reply e-mail, so that our records can be corrected... Thank you. Help conserve valuable resources - only print this email if necessary.
Fred was not alone--and congratulations to him for getting this operational, taking it to levels and adding details that make this an incredibly useful resource! *[optional reading below!]* I did something incredibly similar at my old job, continuing a resource that I had developed as a "proof of concept" within Millennium and transitioning it to a "proof of concept" within Koha. Under both, it was called "Faculty Scholarship". I gave a presentation on it at the Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians in 2018 (*holy cow that was a long time ago now.... * https://wayback.archive-it.org/11102/20180927174532/https://events.library.n... ) The big difference between the two implementations (as I did them) was in how they were kept. Millennium only supported one database, so location scoping was used. In Koha, it ran in its own database and under its own ports (both public and staff side), but also supported its own style sheets for the WebPAC (and bibliographic frameworks, too). For the record, both efforts died on the vine and never moved any further than what was reported in the 2018 presentation. My departure in 2020 would have killed it anyway, so I'm glad I didn't spend the considerable effort it would have taken to keep it going. As an unsupported site (like Fred), I just went ahead and "did things", not needing to work with anyone except myself on making the changes I needed to the system architecture. John _____________________________________ John E. Sterbenz, Jr. *Executive Director* *DALNET - Detroit Area Library Network* Wayne State University 5150 Anthony Wayne Drive Detroit, MI 48202 +1 (313) 577-6789 http://www.dalnet.org On Wed, Mar 22, 2023 at 2:12 PM King, Fred <Fred.King@medstar.net> wrote:
Esteemed Colleagues,
Some of you may be familiar with the MedStar Authors catalog, a Koha instance where I took citations from Medline, the database of medical journal citations run by the US National Library of Medicine and converted them to a format that could be seen and searched in Koha. I was new to Koha when I designed it, I didn’t know what I was doing, and there were a lot of rough edges I wanted to polish in a future version. After much longer than I thought it would take, it's now available at http://www.medstarauthors.org.
So who would want to set up a Koha instance of local authors from Medline citations other than me?
crickets<
Thought so. However, doing this project involved:
Deciding which Medline fields I wanted for the Authors Catalog.
Converting Medline citations in Reference Manager format to MARC records.
Adding new, non-standard MARC fields to the Koha framework.
Editing the OpacResults and OpacDetail xsl files to display the fields I wanted. There are a lot more than in the standard OpacDetail xsl!
Adding the new fields to Elasticsearch, and assigning them to indexes so they're searchable.
Editing masthead.inc to add more basic search options. (Institution 651$a, Department 656$a, etc.)
Editing opac-advsearch.tt to add more search options, and (when you click on "more options") even more search options.
Editing opac-facets.inc to modify the left column in the detail view.
Making it possible (and easy!) to add PDFs and other files to the Koha server itself.
Adding a page to the News function so I can display links to most of the files I've mentioned so far. (needs 22.11)
Putting a lot of data into a spreadsheet to keep track of what field is associated with what MARC tag, Elasticsearch index, etc.
Anyone working on, and being frustrated by, any of the above? Then you may find some of what I've done worth harvesting, at least to look at to see what I've done. It isn't necessarily pretty--XSLT programmers might need their fainting couches--but it works. At least for this installation.
Unfortunately, the site is blocked in some places outside the US, possibly in the EU because our IS department hasn't vetted it for GDPR compliance. (Thanks to David for suggesting the reason.) I think I can put the page with the files on a different server without running afoul of GDPR; I'll do it if anyone's interested.
--Fred
Fred King, MSLS, AHIP
Medical Librarian, MedStar Washington Hospital Center
fred.king@medstar.net
202-877-6670
ORCID 0000-0001-5266-0279
MedStar Authors Catalog: http://medstarauthors.org
You know it's cold outside when you go outside and it's cold.
--NPS Twitter
------------------------------ MedStar Health is a not-for-profit, integrated healthcare delivery system, the largest in Maryland and the Washington, D.C., region. Nationally recognized for clinical quality in heart, orthopedics, cancer and GI.
IMPORTANT: This e-mail (including any attachments) may contain information that is private, confidential, or protected by attorney-client or other privilege. If you received this e-mail in error, please delete it from your system without copying it and notify sender by reply e-mail, so that our records can be corrected... Thank you.
Help conserve valuable resources - only print this email if necessary.
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participants (2)
-
John Sterbenz -
King, Fred