getting stuff into the opac

My current obsession at work is adding content—and thus value—to our opac. Unfortunately, our ILS vendor’s product does not make this easy to accomplish. I have come across a couple of tricks recently to make this happen anyways. Both of my examples below are leveraging content we have created in an external booklists application using ColdFusion.

1. Embedding content using MARC – I discovered this approach in Quinnipiac University’s catalogue where they were using it to embed location maps for particular titles. The method is to use a 970 MARC field (local table of contents) which the opac will display inline. In this example, I’ve used an iframe to embed a booklist in the catalogue page. I think this is a great approach for one-offs where you want to embed some arbitrary content for a particular title.
2. Using javascript and DOM – This approach was suggested to me by Adam Brin at Bryn Mawr. In this case, you include a javascript file on your catalogue page. The javascript figures out the record number of the page it is on and then calls a ColdFusion script which returns some more javascript which uses the DOM to insert some content based on the lookup performed by the ColdFusion script. It’s actually very slick. You can see an example here where on the right side there is a section for “Related Booklists”.

I guess the lesson here is if you’re willing to be a little bit creative and don’t mind abusing cataloguing standards, you can make your opac more flexible than you might have thought.