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Kresge Library - A teaching library with an oustanding student-centered information literacy program
First Search linking to Library Catalogs

First search allows you, through the administrative module, to provide a base URL to perform a search against your web OPAC. But, to get it to work by default, you need to make sure your catalog can support direct searching in the URL format of:

http://mylibary.somewhere.org/someprogram?searchbyISBN=

The above example is very simplified, since most catalog URLs require a lot more name/value pairs be packed into them in order to specify things like what catalog to search, what type of search, how many items to display, etc.

In particular, for our own Voyager OPAC, we need to provide the following:

ISBN Search URL:

http://sailaway.kl.oakland.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&FLD1=ISSN+%28ISBN%29&CNT=50&SAB1=

ISSN Search URL:

http://sailaway.kl.oakland.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&FLD1=ISSN+%28ISSN%29&CNT=50&SAB1=

OCLC Accession number searching:

http://sailaway.kl.oakland.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&BOOL1=as+a+phrase&FLD1=Keyword+Anywhere+%28GKEY%29&CNT=50&HIST=1&SAB1=ocm

The long, complicated "Advanced Search" URL format seems to be required if you want to move the "search tem" name/value pair from the middle of the URL string to the end. Tests using the shorter, basic search based URL and the search term moved to the end of the URL string have hung our OPAC indefinitely.

The ocm addition of the ocm value at the end of the URL seems to be required by _most_ of the OCLC records we have. some, however, have a space character between ocm and the number, which means entries with that format won't match this canned search. it's not perfect, but given the rare amount of time OCLC falls back on this search format, and that the number of non-conforming records seems low, this seems acceptable.