Opac browse feature

N.B. this is a transfer page from the old developer's wiki. If it is no longer relevant and no longer linked from the help files, please do feel free to delete it.

Experimental! (Only works in French Dewey catalog.)

In OPAC, you can activate an option that let you browse the catalogue category by category.

It relies on a specific table, browser, that is filled by a specific script. If you don't run this script, the table will be empty, and there won't be anything in the OPAC page (& the user will be redirected here)

What is it exactly

Browser

The browser feature will build a browsable view of your catalogue. It will, for example, tell you that your catalogue contains : 1353 biblios about “Science” 5624 biblios about “Geography” 9835 biblios about “Spirituality”

then, when the user click on “geography” : 5624 biblios about Geography :

1576 about Europe 579 about Asia 2598 about Africa 871 about America then when the user click on “Europe” : 5624 biblios about Geography :

1576 about Europe 500 about France 257 about UK 430 about Germany …

Tags

The tags feature will show to the users the most used subjects in your catalogue. in a graphical view where the subject is more large when it is used more times.

Running the script

It requires, as usual, KOHA_CONF and PERL5LIB to be set it is misc/cronjobs/build_browser_and_cloud.pl this script calculates the browser & tags for all the catalogue. run the script without parameters to see it's parameters. Note that, at the time of writing this page, the browser works only for french dewey catalogue. It has to be modified to work according to your structure. That's why it can be considered as experimental !

How often should I run it

If you are a library that has a stable collection, the script can probably be run once every 3 months ! If you are a library that has a moving collection (like a public library), then you may find useful to run the script once a month, or once a week.

What you must understand is that :

it's a long process : it reads ALL the catalogue to calculate the result if your catalogue has not changed a lot, then the result won't change a lot either : the browser feature may report 435 biblios and when the user click on it he may reach a list of 437, but the final list will be complete. Same conclusion for tags : if a subject is used 132 times in the catalogue, it will have the same size as a subject used 135 times, so no problems to be approximative.

How to remove that

Just go to the librarian interface, systempreferences, Opac Feature tab, and set OpacBrowser to 0 and/or OpacCloud to 0