John Miedema

FuzzyCat has reached an early milestone. Version 0.5 (alpha) demonstrates that FuzzyCat can crawl at least ten distinct library catalogue (OPAC) models from multiple vendors, as shown at fourteen library websites.

FuzzyCat is an OPAC crawler. It is intended as a way of searching a specified library catalogue for the availability of a particular book. With FuzzyCat, the library’s catalogue is available like a web service. It can be called from any web page. For example, if I use FuzzyCat with OpenBook, a reader could be reading a book review at a website, and along with the OpenBook data, the reader could immediately tell if the given book is available in his or her library.

There are many many OPACs in the world, multiple models from multiple vendors, often with slight variations at each library website. I selected a subset, intending to be representative of those libraries not in WorldCat and those with distinct vendors. Libdex was a handy starting point. FuzzyCat is in an early stage of development, but I wanted a proof of concept. It works, from Horizon to Millenium to Unicorn and WebPac PRO. Hundreds of libraries use these OPACs so FuzzyCat can in principle crawl all of them. The prototype has a text box box that lets you test any catalogue. Give it a shot with your library, especially if yours uses a similar OPAC model to the ten already listed in the dropdowns. Let me know how it goes.

What excites me about the FuzzyCat concept is that it crawls all these OPACs with one algorithm. It is not ready for the real world yet. It has challenges. Looking at OPACs under the hood you would think the designers were trying to hide their catalogues from the web. I suppose I can appreciate their tricks with session identifiers to scale usage, but their wonky javascript redirects and form processing are a challenge that still needs to be resolved. Even so, at this early stage, FuzzyCat can handle ten distinct OPACs with one generic algorithm. This fact means that any library can open their catalogue without doing a thing, and without paying a cent. Did I mention that FuzzyCat is free and open source? You can download the source code.

Readers of the series will notice that I am reiterating key ideas: many OPACs, one algorithm, free and open source. I want to impress readers with those themes because I think FuzzyCat needs a home. It needs full-time attention, and I already have a full-time job, part-time school, and a real-time family. And I have neglected OpenBook. Look foward to some meaty posts yet in this series, but barring a sponsor of some sort, I must shelve FuzzyCat. Know anyone looking for a cat? Let’s talk.