BibLibre keep on contributing to drupal-opac (No less than four two-weeks sprints, involving four developers and two librarians each since early september.). Reminder: drupal-opac allows libraries to integrate their catalog with Drupal. The 4th code sprint just ended last friday with the first release of the module: 7.x-1.0-alpha1.
This is an opportunity to show you what’s new since the module has been accepted by the Drupal community (see BibLibre contributes the drupal opac module in “full project”).
Harvest plugins
It is now possible to use harvest plugins. Those plugins, which are called when importing bibliographic records in Drupal, allow to make more complex mappings than usual. It could be used for fields concatenations, converting a value in taxonomy terms or even make it urls (i.e. in order to have search link). Obviously, it is possible to create its own plugins as modules without hacking drupal-opac.
Authorities
It is an important feature (in terms of development time at least…), which justified the creation of a new sub module: “OPAC authorities”. As its name suggests, it adds the ability to manage authorities in Drupal catalog. With a compliant ILS, it allows to harvest authorities and make mappings like we do for biblios records. Note that it is also possible to create authority types in Drupal and to define different mappings depending on this types.
There is more! OPAC authorities is also … an harvest plugin! This plugin create authority links when harvesting biblios records. Because this authorities are entities that Drupal knows, it is possible searching biblios by typing a term contained in an linked authority (such as see also references or main heading).
Others
- We can now change its ILS password from drupal opac,
- in the holding page, users can see their rank,
- a dedicated connector for Koha has been created,
- it is possible to import borrowers (ILS => Drupal)
- Module performances has been improved.
