Andrew Nagy

Villanova University’s Falvey Memorial Library has longed for a beautiful pig; however, we determined in early 2006 that pigs were only good at searching for truffles, so we decided to build our own OPAC.

After developing our own custom Digital Library from a Native XML Database, we quickly appreciated the ease of development with XQuery and XSLT. We then launched full speed ahead into the development of a new OPAC from scratch using XML technologies and MARCXML.

This presentation will describe the process of choosing an NXDB and optimizing it for large data set performance. Developing searches that take about 2 minutes to process and optimizing them down to about 2 seconds. I will also describe the development processes of the OPAC interface including the AJAX features we have implemented. I will share our success stories and our failures.

Presentation

MyResearch Portal: An XML based Catalog-Independent OPAC (PPT - 5MB)

Application Preview You can preview our SOLRized OPAC: MyResearch Portal

Video

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