One important thing from my point of view is to let the librarians define the output formats by themselves, XSL is not my first choice because I think it's too complex for them. Our librarians already knows a Pascal like tiny language implemented in Micro-ISIS, the Unesco cataloging tool (free but closed source I believe). I was planning to implement something alike. I'll try to join the meeting, is it today? or next Monday? or maybe two days from today, next Wednesday? In any case, our dedicated koha programmer has quit, we're looking for a new one, it's not easy because in our country the computer skills market is almost 100% employed (sorry if this is not the right expression, my english leaks....). As soon as we found "the one" we'll begin implementing this, we'll be happy if we can cooperate with the main team again. -- Ing. Ernesto Silva. Coordinador de Desarrollo Web y Sistemas Abiertos Universidad ORT Uruguay. E-mail: silva@ort.edu.uy Tel: (+598-2) 902-1505 ext. 206 Joshua Ferraro wrote:

Hi Ernesto,

On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 10:11:56AM -0300, Ernesto Silva wrote:

...

Hi guys, I've added a new paragraph titled "biblios display formatting" at http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:development:roadmap2.2.x can you please check it out and tell me what you think, I'm I nuts or is it feasible?

I think you hit the nail on the head with the XML/XSLT technique. In fact, this is what we're planning to do with Koha 3.2 and the Alvis filter. This is a Zebra feature that allows us to pull records directly in XML format from the index engine, then run them through any pre-defined XSLT transformation to alter the display for the results and detail pages. If you'd like to get involved in this development I'd suggest joining us on Monday at 20:00 GMT in the IRC channel irc.katipo.co.nz #koha

Cheers,

Hi Tümer, As I understand, the librarians can basically generate a list of marc fields to display, and I supouse they can also add some punctuation symbols between them. Is this the case? In any case I'll try to explain what our librarians want: they want a little programming language, something with at least the following functionality: - test for a marc field to exists. - test for a marc field to contain some specific string, maybe using regular expressions, they'll need help with thisione.. - if-then-else alike statements. - while/for alike statements. Why? well, they tell me that for example, they want to display bibliographics formatting, and not every biblio type has the same display which in this case can be solved with the matrix. The problem is that even biblios of the same type not always have the same marcfields because of the lack of original information or different cataloguing criteria during past time or personnel. So the latter case the displayed information depends on the marc record itself, no in the biblio type record. The main reasons behind my position is that the system must be developer-independant and librarian understandable, can be laborious but understandable. I don't believe HTML/XML/XSL/XSLT will be understandable for librarians. I don't know which is the knowledge level of librarians in other countries, I'd like someone to comment on this, my criteria is uruguayan librarians dependant only ;) Cheers, -- Ing. Ernesto Silva. Coordinador de Desarrollo Web y Sistemas Abiertos Universidad ORT Uruguay. E-mail: silva@ort.edu.uy Tel: (+598-2) 902-1505 ext. 206 Tümer Garip wrote:

Hi, The current koha_head which uses ZEBRA and MARCXML makes it very possible to implement a librarian generated display screen. We have already the table that matches marc fields to common names like title,author,itemtype etc. And the current API although hardcoded to return specific headings for search alreday reads the XML to return the correct fields. There is no more biblioitems so forth. We always read a MARCXML record and show whatever we want. With ZEBRA this is very fast. So we can have a matrix that the librarian can fill with simple names from a dropdown list or even MARC field numbers and fill them on the fly very easily. I am trying to get HEAD to work with minimum bug by the end of this month so you should be able to play with by then. However predefind XSL sheets are also very fast and I think we should have those as well as part of the package.

Cheers Tumer -----Original Message----- From: koha-devel-bounces+tgarip=neu.edu.tr@nongnu.org [mailto:koha-devel-bounces+tgarip=neu.edu.tr@nongnu.org] On Behalf Of Ernesto Silva Sent: Monday, September 11, 2006 4:12 PM To: koha-devel@nongnu.org Subject: [Koha-devel] Display formatting

Hi guys, I've added a new paragraph titled "biblios display formatting" at http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:development:roadmap2.2.x can you please check it out and tell me what you think, I'm I nuts or is it feasible?

Regards,