Webvoyage Lists

This script came out of a requirement from waikato university to make available online lists of parts of our collection. Say items in french or dvds.

The script can also produce an RSS feed for each catagory.

How does it work?

This perlscript relies on two perl modules (IO::File and DBI::Oracle) they are available from cpan. In order to install DBI::Oracle you need to have the Oracle client software installed on your machine.

The program is called with one arguement, an ini file which specifies all the information needed for the current list. The ini file format looks like this:

variablename: variablevalue 

Any line with a colon in it will be treated as a valid ini line.

The ini file options are:

You can include any number of other variablename: variable combinations in your ini file. When reading in the header and footer files the perlscript automatically replaces text in the format <<variablename>> with the text from the ini file. Your ini file can also include other <<variablename>> references in it...

There are a number of 'special' variables you can using in your header and footer they are:

SQL Format

The sql file must produce 3 columns:

  1. The bib_id for the item (Column must be named bib_id)
  2. The title for the item (Column must be named title)
  3. The category for the item (Column must be named category)

For examples see sql queries for:

Anything else?

You will also need to change the variables near the beginning of the perlscript to suit your own institution. They are the the link to your catalogue, and the login details for the database.

I haven't spent a lot of time coming up with good error messages or error checking so if you get a cryptic error you might have to do a bit of investigation to figure out what is going wrong.

As usual if you have any comments, code improvements or suggestions please feel free to email me j.brunskill AT waikato.ac.nz

Downloads:

See Also: Our blog (Library Cogs).


This page was written by James Brunskill (www.jambe.co.nz) in March 2007

Note: The code linked to from this page was developed while James was working for the University of Waikato Library. If for any reason the university would like this page and associated scripts to be removed or moved to a different location, I reserve the right to do so.