Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Redirecting OPACs in the Evergreen ILS

We currently use the Evergreen open-source ILS, and after upgrading to version 2.2, we switched to the new TPac from the old JSPac. The new OPAC is faster and has some nice features, like sending call numbers to a phone.
But there was one problem: we have a whole lot of links in our web content (mostly in libguides) to titles on the JSPac. I wanted to redirect those URLs to the same items on the TPAC, so users wouldn't be confused by the old interface. In the process, I found that some of our librarians linked to title searches rather than individual item records. (Thanks, libguides authors!) So I decided to try to redirect a few more kinds of the old OPAC URLs.
Just in case there's anyone else in the same boat, here's a generic version of the code I came up with. This is all Apache configuration info, placed in the relevant VirtualHost section of eg.conf.

It handles all the old links I could find in our web content:

  • links to the main catalog page
  • links to the OPAC login page
  • links to individual item records, and
  • links to basic search results
One could do a more thorough and/or reliable job of this. I didn't attempt to handle advanced searches, for example. On the off chance anyone uses or improves on this, please let me know!
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2 comments:

  1. Hekman Library (Calvin College)January 11, 2013 at 11:39 AM

    Hi David,

    Hekman Library needs to solve the same problem as we move from JSPAC to TPAC. Thanks for sharing your code, it's a helpful start! Have you done anything more with this since October?

    Remington

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  2. DavidMay 1, 2013 at 11:01 AM

    Sorry for my lack of attention to this blog! I haven't done any more work on this, since it handles all our existing links. Of course it doesn't handle every possible JSPAC URI, but it will make sure that anyone who follows an old path into the JSPAC will quickly end up in the TPAC.

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