Sponsor

Deborah Holmes-Wong
Project Manager, IDM
USC Library
dhwong@usc.edu
213-740-2867

Description
The USC Libraries' information about USC's electronic resources, databases and journals has moved from an in-house system, the Electronic Resources Database, http://was.usc.edu/eresources/isd/ to a hosted solution. The vendor is in the process of creating a public interface, but we're not sure if it's what we need. The interface that they currently provide leaves much to be desired

http://zb5lh7ed7a.scholar.serialssolutions.com/.

The vendor provides a Web services API that will enable us to do create our own interface. We'd like to prototype an interface that uses their API and also incorporates other library information like the HTML search boxes from our Scholars Portal vendor and select RSS/XML feeds that are transformed and readable on these pages. We'd like be able to generate a series of discipline specific RSS feeds/Web pages that can be hooked into the USC portal. When faculty and students login to the campus portal and select the library portal, the default would be a list of the appropriate electronic resources for their area of research based on department information garnered from the Global Directory Service instead of a generic one-size fits all Web page.

Constraints: Final product must use Linux/Unix/MacOsX type operating system. XML, XSLT, XHTML, JSP and Java are likely to be used. We are building a Ruby on Rails development environment and students in class would be able to build in this environment. We have limited support for PHP and no support for ASP or .NET.