Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Openbiblio Working with Amazon lookup

Thanks to LIS student Kris Meen, we now have the Amazon lookup working with the Openbiblio ILS. The problem had been that it installed ok but that every search turned up zero results.

We had obtained an access key by registereding with Amazon web services. The problem was that Amazon provided a key ID as well as a secret access key.

We had originally followed the instructions for the patch and edited the amazon conf.php file and added the secret access key. The solution is to use the access key ID not the secret key.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Open Biblio Again

Back to the little library system. We tried to get the Library of Congress lookup patch working without success. I think we made all the changes but it seems to be looking for a .php file in the catalog folder. Will troubleshoot later.

Today we want to try web biblio, a fork of the open biblio project. We downloaded the .zip from the open biblio downloads page link and unzipped the webbiblio3 folder to xampplite/htdocs.

We then went to http://localhost/webbiblio3/install/ to bring up the installation instructions. First task is to create the mySQL database. We open a DOS command shell and run mysql -hlocalhost -uroot to connect to the database server running on the USB stick and issue the following commands:

create database webbiblio;
use webbiblio;

mysql> grant all privileges on WebBiblio.* to webbib@localhost identified by 'zx8180';

Interesting, you don't have to edit the database_constants.php file as the instructions contain a web form that does it for you. I'll leave it as the default of root with no password as this is a USB stick - otherwise we would change it to the webbib user we just created.

After clicking SUBMIT the message database created successfully is displayed. We click on the link and the home page is displayed. We click the Admin tab and login with username admin and password admin.

We want to take a look at this system as a solution to the digital files problem. We have terabytes of digital files, mainly ebooks, video and audio. With this system we could grab cataloging data by doing a LOC or Amazon lookup on the ISBN and then upload the matching ebook file or audio/video file. There is a 128mb limit on file uploads but that can be changed.

We note an error 'upload folder is not writable'. Looking at webbiblio3 folder - where do the uploads go? No information on the web site. Looks like you got to search the source code to figure it out. Documentation is nice....