I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that we use syndetics to provide cover images in our catalogue. One area of weakness has always been lack of covers for movies and music cds. Most of these lack isbns which makes cover access a problem.
To compound this, the iii opac will not allow you to use upc codes for access without purchasing a product called webbridge, a “content linking” product. This week, I discovered a workaround for this.
Basically, a upc code is a 12 digit number. If, when you are creating your video/cd record, you create an 020 field (it needs to be the first one), enter the upc code but add a leading zero to it. This tricks the
opac into thinking it is a 13 digit isbn and passing it to syndetics unmolested. Syndetics have very nicely decided to accept this trick even though you are really supposed to pass a upc to them using a special upc field which would require javascript to rig up.
You can see this using the following records:
Movies:
http://search.cambridgelibraries.ca/record=b1346565~S15
http://search.cambridgelibraries.ca/record=b1346568~S15
http://search.cambridgelibraries.ca/record=b1329399~S15
Music CDs:
http://search.cambridgelibraries.ca/record=b1333890~S15
http://search.cambridgelibraries.ca/record=b1337125~S15
http://search.cambridgelibraries.ca/record=b1342353~S15
The movie coverage does not seem to be great but cd coverage looks suprisingly good based on a brief survey.
An additional issue I noticed: the “more info” links to additional syndetics content don’t really work properly when using this “fake isbn” method of access. To get around this, I wrote a little javascript that rewrites the link for these fake isbns into proper upc links to the additional content. This is not live on our opac yet and our staging port seems to be firewalled again but it should be live shortly.
[update]: The javascript is now live.
