Here are some ideas on how to add links to Voyager’s MARC records to allow OPAC users to navigate to images and other resources such as PDFs.
Prerequisites.
- Material such as copyright cleared book cover images, TOC documents held (produced?) locally, or PDFs (etc.) produced locally or provided by the publisher with the requirement that they be stored locally for delivery.
- The desire to insert clickable links in the Voyager record to allow users to navigate to the material.
- A publicly accessible web server (such as the Voyager web server in a split-server Voyager configuration).
- A member of staff with access to the web server via ftp and access to the server directories as the voyager user.
Discussion.
At University of the Arts London the database name is uoadb, and the URL to the Voyager Tomcat OPAC is http://voyager.arts.ac.uk. Those wishing to follow the steps listed below will need to replace the UAL db name (often described at xxxdb) and URL appropriately.
We have a number of collections which have book covers and title pages available locally as web-appropriate sized jpeg images. Also while most e-material is hosted remotely as part of the e-Library, we are receiving a number of PDFs directly from suppliers, for local hosting. (Often the publishers require that a password be added to the PDFs to ensure only UAL students have access to the content.)
We have used the public facing web server (from our split db/app and web server Voyager system) to hold the data supplied and have added data in 856 fields in the bibliographic record to allow the data to be displayed or called up for reading.
Locating the Document Root, and server activities.
(I may not be describing the more technical issues using the correct jargon, so apologies to those offended by my loose terminology below.)
The Voyager webserver has a Document Root (take this as “another name for” the OPAC URL. Our OPAC is at http://voyager.arts.ac.uk and resources (image, PDF, whatever) are placed under this subdirectory.
For WebVoyage Tomcat, the document root is listed in the apache configuration file xxx{_}db_vwebvhttpd.conf in the folder /m1/shared/apache2/conf/ and in the case of UAL is:
/m1/voyager/uoadb/tomcat/vwebv/context/vwebv/htdocs
Below this folder I have added a number of subdirectories, while logged on as the voyager user. For local reasons I added digital as a “parent” and under it are a number of directories where material for the collections and the PDFs are stored.
An example- for our ndb collection, 218 web-appropriate sized cover images have been ftpd up to /m1/voyager/uoadb/tomcat/vwebv/context/vwebv/htdocs/digital/ndb/
A couple of comments.
- Make sure backups are kept, and check that the data is still under the document root after any Voyager upgrade, especially a major one.
- We are on RH Linux and so made sure that the filenames used were “unix friendly”.
Cataloguing activities.
The cataloguing side of things involves matching the images to the record via an http entry in the 856 $u. For us the file location is inserted in the format
[http://voyager.arts.ac.uk/digital/[subdirectory_name]/filename|http://voyager.arts.ac.uk/digital/%5...e%5D/filename]
The results.
Here’s an example of a record with a link to a password-protected PDF. http://voyager.arts.ac.uk/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=450201
Here are the 856 links in the staff view:
$y Click here to access password information $u http://www.arts.ac.uk/e-library/e-resourcepasswords
$y Click here to read this e-Book $u http://voyager.arts.ac.uk/digital/PIRA/EuroPrint2013.pdf
Here’s an example of a record with a link to cover images from our ndb collection:http://voyager.arts.ac.uk/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=147063
Here are the 856 links in the staff view:
$z Click here for copyright notice and further details $u http://voyager.arts.ac.uk/digital/ndb/rights.html
$z Front cover / spine image (1) $u http://voyager.arts.ac.uk/digital/ndb/740_1.jpg
$z Front cover / spine image (2) $u http://voyager.arts.ac.uk/digital/ndb/740_2.jpg
$z Front cover image $u http://voyager.arts.ac.uk/digital/ndb/740_3.jpg
$z Title page image $u http://voyager.arts.ac.uk/digital/ndb/740_4.jpg
Comments
- We do not use ImageServer.
- Because of the size of some of the images we have chosen not to have images appearing directly on the results screen. We are about to digitize small cover images for a collection of zines, and we want to display these directly on the page rather than via a link. For this I will be using the help provided by Laura Guy from Colorado School of Mines.
Check out this record in the Mines catalogue.
[http://csmphotos.coalliance.org/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=318|http://csmphotos.coalliance.org/vweb...nfo?bibId=318]
Here is the MARC data- showing the $u and $z.
$u http://library.mines.edu/digital/mmi/SC156.gif
$z <img src="http://library.mines.edu/digital/mmi/SC156_small.gif">
With thanks to Laura- this will make our OPAC even more image-rich one the zines are ready for uploading.
I hope this is useful to those wanting some ideas on linking in Voyager.
Ray Delahunty
Systems Support Librarian
University of the Arts London
r.delahunty@arts.ac.uk
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