libopac is a Java library that can connect to online catalogs (OPACs) of public libraries and access their search and account data features. It is used by our own Android app.
Web catalogues of different library system vendors are supported, see our website or wiki for details.
The library is available through JCenter. Snippets for Maven or Gradle build configuration files and JAR downloads are available there.
The following resources should help you to get started on using libopac:
- Basic sample project using Maven
- Basic sample project using Gradle
- Javadoc
- JSON configuration files for more than 1000 public and university libraries
If you have any questions, please open an issue on GitHub.
If you want to use libopac on Android, the setup is currently a little complicated because it uses the Apache HTTP client, an older version of which is included in Android and now deprecated. Please use our own build.gradle file as a reference. In particular, you will need the following lines (maybe more):
android {
// ...
packagingOptions {
exclude 'META-INF/NOTICE'
exclude 'META-INF/LICENSE'
}
useLibrary 'org.apache.http.legacy'
}
dependencies {
compile('net.opacapp:libopac:+') { // you can insert the latest version here
transitive = false
}
compile 'org.apache.httpcomponents:httpclient-android:4.3.5.1'
// additional libopac dependencies
}We are planning to replace the Apache HTTP client with OkHttp in the future, which will eliminate these problems.
Being a part of the Web Opac App project, this code is also licensed under the terms of the MIT License.