In case you were wondering whether the new UCB library catalogue, OskiCat,* could interface with Socrates (Stanford's catalogue) the way that our old catalogue, Pathfinder, could, the answer is no.
Gladis is elaborate homebrew from the 1970s, and it ran on failover Tandem servers. Pathfinder was just a Web interface to Gladis, which is why renewals were never coded in properly. Oskicat (I don't like the name, either) is reskinned software created by Innovative and used by dozens of other libraries.
I suspect it's either "No, we're not going to rewrite the code so that it talks to Socrates" (which runs Sirsi, unmodified for several years, AFAIK) or "No, our support contract with Innovative prohibits writing a code bridge." Does that help at all? It would be nice, yes, but before the few brief years during which Pathfinder talked to Socrates, RLCP users looked up Socrates records separately.
One alt is to use Worldcat to check proximity, but of course it isn't updated daily. (Whether something's on the shelf is checked when the Web page for that book loads, but newly catalogued books aren't visible immediately. Melvyl has this lag problem, too.)
Two postscripts: prior comment and this one = speaking only for myself. (In case it matters.)
Also, the CD-ROMs available only on campus are going away soon as well, in case surprise disappearances are troubling. :) Too much cost to maintain licenses, I suspect, and not enough user interest any more.
4 comments:
On behalf of UC librarians--my apologies. Bad sport on the part of whoever did this.
Someone already wrote me on behalf of UC librarians, to act really nonchalant about it, like they totally meant to lose this function.
Gladis is elaborate homebrew from the 1970s, and it ran on failover Tandem servers. Pathfinder was just a Web interface to Gladis, which is why renewals were never coded in properly. Oskicat (I don't like the name, either) is reskinned software created by Innovative and used by dozens of other libraries.
I suspect it's either "No, we're not going to rewrite the code so that it talks to Socrates" (which runs Sirsi, unmodified for several years, AFAIK) or "No, our support contract with Innovative prohibits writing a code bridge." Does that help at all? It would be nice, yes, but before the few brief years during which Pathfinder talked to Socrates, RLCP users looked up Socrates records separately.
One alt is to use Worldcat to check proximity, but of course it isn't updated daily. (Whether something's on the shelf is checked when the Web page for that book loads, but newly catalogued books aren't visible immediately. Melvyl has this lag problem, too.)
Two postscripts: prior comment and this one = speaking only for myself. (In case it matters.)
Also, the CD-ROMs available only on campus are going away soon as well, in case surprise disappearances are troubling. :) Too much cost to maintain licenses, I suspect, and not enough user interest any more.
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