Blacklight discovery interface (U Wisconsin-Madison)

[zuphilip]

The university of Wisconsin-Madison went live with their new cataloguing system Alma (from ExLibris) and discovery interface blacklight (open source):

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/49689/uwmadison-library-catalog-no-longer-allowing-direct-import/

I performed just a simple search in their github repository:

https://github.com/projectblacklight/blacklight/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=zotero

It looks that the easiest would be to convince them, to activate coins metadata.

Opinions?

[adam3smith]

they should enable COinS as a matter of principle (e.g. for Mendeley), but they have MARC and RIS easily accessible, which should get us significantly better/richer data.

[zuphilip]

You mean e.g. https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/999792432102121/staff . Do you know if that link will work in the future also for non-staff?

Here are some other blacklight instances: http://projectblacklight.org/#examples

[adam3smith]

all the examples pages still have MARC accessible, so I'd be pretty confident. Problem is that the URLs and even the display format is all over the place.
Cornell has unAPI implemented on their blacklight, most other places (Columbia, Johns Hopkins, U Virginia) have COinS.

[zuphilip]

Most of the examples (especially the library catalogues) have in their head the marc or marcxml links, e.g.

<link href="http://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/2891684.marc" rel="alternate" title="marc" type="application/marc">
<link type="application/marcxml+xml" title="marcxml" rel="alternate" href="http://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/2891684.marcxml"></link>

This seems much easier to translate and the display format is constant (maybe it needs a tiny preprocessing). These links are also present in the blacklight demo page (see e.g. here), and thus it should be easy for the remaining institutions to activate the marc/marcxml view under those standard links as well.

However, it seems non-trivial to detect a blacklight catalogue easy (at least I don't have an idea at the moment). So, I would like to ask, whether we can overall pages try to detect and parse those special links? Maybe as part of the unapi translator. Opinions?

[adam3smith]

We have translators both for Wisconsin specifically and for Blacklight generally now