Creating an RSS feed of the books you have checked out of the library

Very neat! We’re in the beta testing stage of a service (www.libraryelf.com) that helps users keeps tabs of their library books - it works similarly to what you are describing except it uses email as the delivery vehicle. Buzz’s comment about libraries wanting the overdue fines is mostly correct from our experience in trying to market our service to them (even though our service is free for the beta phase). However a few libraries are sensible enough to see beyond the fines and give our service a try. I’d like to know what are the advantages of RSS over email? Our testers don’t seem to be taking advantage of RSS but everyone has email. If there are distinct advantages to RSS for library email notification then perhaps we should consider adding that to our service as well. Great work, continued success!

Matt, the script I wrote is tuned exclusively for Dynix (aka Epixtech) OPACs. Each OPAC has its own URL scheme, and its own set of “screens” for delivering information, and so the script would have to be customized to work with any other OPAC (and, probably, any other library system if there is a different HTML template in use). Buzz, the head of the PEI Provincial Library said here that “[t]he main goal for the new policy [of charging fines] was to get library books back, not generate lots of revenue.”

Brilliant, Peter (as always!) You should post a note here about the work you did with the Amazon API and InterLibrary Loans. There is a circulation protocol called SIP that I have even used, but I don’t know if it gives fines information. If it did, it might be a way to get around variations in OPACs.

if you want some real fun with your OPAC, get rid of the #focus part and stick &GetXML=true on the end — voila, you get the data on the page as XML which you can then run through your own stylesheets or parse as XML… should make hacks like this much easier in the future.

Yay! I posted something about this to the LazyWeb a while back and you’ve done it!

nestor - the &GetXML=true is a neat find!!! I think it’s going to help with the parsing of the ItemsOut and Hold tables for our email reminder service. Any more tricks for Dynix? Or perhaps for III or Sirsi?

Carolyne: I’m not in a position to do what you request — the code is designed for people with access to a system that can run Perl with some additional modules, and who understand enough about Perl to customize the script to their own situation. Sorry.

Peter: are you planning on exposing more of how you do what you do? I can run your script, but my library seems to have shifted things around, such that the due date appears in the checked out area and the due date is blank. and SpiceDog? You need to switch to decaf ;-) you can login to many libraries and check your account: all Peter has done is automate it. You then publish it (in whatever secure but accessible way you choose) so you can access it in a newsreader. It could be on your local system (http://localhost/mybooks.xml). Can’t get more secure than that . .

I have taken the original script and modified it to work with the GetXML true and to get called as a CGI. This way you don’t store any data anywhere except in the RSS reader. Unfortunately the net effect is that any reader “Windows” rss reader will probably show many instances of the messages from the server because there is a new session ID for every access. We have installed the script on our website to be accessed from the Sun Microsystems Portal server for outr students. you can try it out: #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use LWP::Simple; use HTML::TreeBuilder; use XML::RSS; use XML::Simple ;##qw(:strict); my $DEBUG = 0; my $Q_STRING = “”; my $opacurl = “http:///ipac20/ipac.jsp”; ## The main URL of HIP ## If this file is called as a URL, call like: ## http://foo.com/file.pl?: $Q_STRING = $ENV{‘QUERY_STRING’}; ## IF THERE IS NO QUERY STRING THEN ASSUME COMMANDLINE CALL: ## file.pl : if (!defined($Q_STRING)) { $Q_STRING = $ARGV[0]; } ## when in debug mode dump some stuff to a LOGFILE if ($DEBUG) { open(LOGFILE, “>>” . “/tmp/sunportal.html”) || die “Cannot read LOG file\n”; printf(LOGFILE “\n”); printf(LOGFILE “** new request **\n”); printf(LOGFILE “\n”); printf(LOGFILE “RAW Q STRING: ‘%s’\n”, $Q_STRING); } #Separate the command arguments my ($barcode,$PIN) = split (‘:’, $Q_STRING); ## when in debug mode dump some stuff to a LOGFILE if ($DEBUG) { printf(LOGFILE “BARCODE: ‘%s’\n”, $barcode); printf(LOGFILE “PIN: ‘%s’\n”, $PIN); } ###–––––––––— ### Get the SessionID ###–––––––––— my $url = “$opacurl?profile=pac&menu=account&submenu=itemsout&GetXML=true”; my $page = get( $url ) or die $!; my $xmldata = XMLin($page); my $session = $xmldata→{session}; die “No H.I.P. session could be started” unless($session); $url=”$opacurl?profile=gmct&menu=account&submenu=itemsouti&session=$session&sec1 =$barcode&sec2=$PIN”; ###–––––––––––––––––––— ### Grab the Items Out page ###–––––––––––––––––––— my $item_url = “$url&GetXML=true”; $page = get( $item_url ) or die $!; $xmldata = XMLin($page); my $p = $xmldata→{itemsoutdata}; my $secure_ele = $xmldata→{security}; my $name = $secure_ele→{name}; printf(LOGFILE “NAME: ‘%s’\n”, $name) if ($DEBUG); ###–––––––––––––––––––— ### Start a new RSS object ###–––––––––––––––––––— my $rss = new XML::RSS(version ⇒ ‘0.91’,encoding ⇒ ‘ISO-8859-1’); $rss→channel( title ⇒ $name . “‘s Library Books”, link ⇒ “$url”, description ⇒ ‘Books I have checked out of the library’, ); ###–––––––––––––––––––— ### Parse Items Out ###–––––––––––––––––––— my $list = $p→{itemout}; for my $item (keys(%$list)) { my ($title,$cko,$due,$lnk); $title = $list→{$item}→{disptitle}; $lnk = $list→{$item}→{TITLE}→{data}→{link}→{func}; $cko = $list→{$item}→{ckodate}; $due = $list→{$item}→{duedate}; $rss→add_item( title ⇒ $title, link ⇒ “$opacurl?profile=gmct&menu=search&session=$sessi on&uri=$lnk&source=~!training”, description ⇒ “Checked out: ” . $cko . “
” . “Due back on: < b>” . $due . “” ); } ###–––––––––––––––––––— ### Output to STDOUT for browser who called me. ###–––––––––––––––––––— print “Content-type: text/xml\n\n”; print $rss→as_string; ## when in debug mode dump some stuff to a LOGFILE if ($DEBUG) { printf(LOGFILE “Content-type: text/xml\n\n”); if ($DEBUG>1){ printf(LOGFILE “\n”); printf(LOGFILE $rss→as_string); printf(LOGFILE “\n”); } printf(LOGFILE “** end request **\n”); printf(LOGFILE “\n”); printf(LOGFILE “\n”); close(LOGFILE); }

I see that the BLOG writer took out my “<” VAR_NAME “>” references in the following lines: my $opacurl = “http://”<” your URL here “>”/ipac20/ipac.jsp”; ## The main URL ## http://foo.com/file.pl?”<” secondID “>”:”<” pin “>” ## file.pl “<” secondID “>”:”<” pin “>” Please look for these lines and add in what is missing

I’ve created a yahoo widget that can display a library user’s current books out and holds. It should work for any library that uses the horizon portal. It’s free and can be downloaded at: http://dev.ulti.org/libraryWidget —reid holmes