WebVoyage Tomcat - OCLC Citation in ActionBox for item

Tags: elympics , oclc , webservice , actionbox , webvoyage , tomcat , voyager , intermediate , apa , citation , mla , chicago , turabian , harvard , sfx
Last Updated: Apr 01, 2010 04:06

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• Description

  This facility is really popular with, (mainly), our first-year students, who are new to APA, and referencing in general.

  It uses an OCLC webservice, (requires registration), to retrieve a formatted citation for a book, or journal. The citation can be in either APA, Chicago, Harvard, MLA or Turabian formats. The advantage of this script is that, if you don't have an OCLC number for the book or journal, (a required parameter of the webservice), you can use an ISBN or ISSN instead. If an ISSN or ISBN is provided, then the xISSN or xISBN API (also provided by OCLC) is used, so there will be a slight delay, but the citation is cached for later use.

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• Author:
• Tom Pasley
• Institution:
• Universal College of Learning
• Year:
• 2010

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License: BSD style
Short description: Use, modification and distribution of the code are permitted provided the copyright notice, list of conditions and disclaimer appear in all related material.
Link to terms: [Detailed license terms]

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Skill required for using this code:

•   Intermediate, provided Perl is installed on your webserver - requires telnet access to server to set permissions for script.

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State

'Fairly stable' - could be integrated with other products too (see "Other possibilities").

Programming language

Perl

Software requirements

Requires your Perl to be installed and configured on a suitable webserver.

Uses a number of Perl modules:

• HTTP::Request
• Unicode::Normalize
• URI::Escape
• XML::Simple
• LWP::UserAgent

- which were part of our install, although your mileage may vary.

Screen captures

Example from "actionbox" in record:

Example "standalone" from the Perl script:

Author(s) email

t.pasley@(nospam)ucol.ac.nz

Download

Page attachments can be seen below.

Working examples

http://libcat.ucol.ac.nz/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=17529&sk=sandbox

http://libcat.ucol.ac.nz/vwebv/oclccitation.cgi?isbn=0815110065&bibId=17529

Using the following Ex Libris open interfaces

...as currently used in TomCat WebVoyage

Changes

31 March 2010

Fixed an error in local_worldCatInfo.xsl so ISSNs are included in the URL sent to the oclccitation.cgi script, changing:

to

31 March 2010

I've made the oclccitation.cgi script slightly more secure, and made sure we didn't trust the input for the script more than we had to... I've added two subroutines to purify script inputs for numbers (bibID and oclcnum) and ISNs (ISBN and ISSN).

The cached path should be absolute (i.e. from the root directory of your server), to help make the script secure.

The error messages are also more explicit, to help provide the user with an idea of why there is no citation.

Also added code to catch response for "unknownId" in OCLC response.

Initial release

Ported from PHP, with significant modifications.

Release notes

Requires registration with the OCLC webservice, (details below), to provide a functional OCLC webservices key, which you must enter in the script:

replace:

DMuvU3v3GkxLdzoRoekucr6feeEAbaFW4kdMz5IAP1WZvI93EuTheQ20ZrgAvv5AJzmSnss8WnIzy

- with your valid OCLC webservices key (this one isn't valid).

OCLC WorldCat API registration

Qualifying OCLC Member libraries can sign up for a WorldCat Search API key at http://www.worldcat.org/affiliate/tools?atype=wcapi.

The WorldCat Basic API can be used, so if you're not an OCLC Member Library, you can still sign up for a WorldCat Basic Key at  http://www.worldcat.org/wcpa/content/affiliate/default.jsp. Although the Basic service provides only 1,000 queries a day, that should be more than enough for most situations.

Installation instructions

There are three files to configure and install, in this order:

oclccitation.cgi

Configure these variables (takes 2 minutes or so - very easy):

• my $cache_path (must be read/writable by everyone)
• my $oclcwskey
• my $affiliateID
• my $citationTitle
• my $preCitationText
• my $postCitationText
• my $citation_style

Place in Perl cgi-bin directory on your configured Apache server, and make executable using

Make sure that the script works, by trying with some examples, with this link template:

http://path.to/script/oclccitation.cgi?isbn=isbn&bibId=bibIDofitem

/xsl/pageFacets/displayFacets.xsl (Ex Libris code reference supplied) - backup your own copy before making changes.

1. the first addition in the same place in your file
2. the second addition in a similar place (though you can move it up if you want to, while preserving the html structure).

xsl/local_worldCatInfo.xsl (supplied)

Optional extra install (-allows editing of cached citations)

If you want, you can also install editoclccitation.cgi - provided you sort out where to put it (I've put it in our webadmin/cgi-bin directory). You can put it anywhere that you can provide protection using Apache config, using directives similar to those for webadmin.

Configure these variables (takes 2 minutes or so - very easy):

• my $cache_path
• my $affiliateID
• my $citationTitle
• my $preCitationText
• my $postCitationText
• my $css

Place in Perl cgi-bin directory on your configured Apache server, and make executable using

And then test that it works by using the page in question:

it should be straightforward from that point on, provided you know basic html - in this example, the publisher is different from that provided in the OCLC citation:

TO DO list

It seems to be okay with OCLC to cache, and edit the response.

Other possibilities...

Known issues

editoclccitation.cgi :

• You may have trouble with permissions, if you haven't configured the directory properly. When editing citations, you can either do this via FTP, (as the voyager user), or by the cgi script I've provided. However, you can't edit a record that you've FTP'd using this script, as it will have different privileges!

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Comments

Let me know if you have any problems.