John Miedema

In a burst of inspiration some months ago, I created FuzzyCat, a prototype crawler of library OPACs. A crawler has the ability to search library catalogues and make its content available on the web. It has been said that library catalogues are not amenable to crawling, but an early FuzzyCat prototype demonstrated that it could crawl 10 distinct vendor catalogues used by hundreds of libraries. I hit a wall as I attempted to include catalogues that made more extensive use of javascript, especially for page redirects. The problem is solvable by embedding a javascript interpreter in FuzzyCat, but I needed time to evaluate potential candidates. Time became a real issue, and I put the project in standby mode as I went about finishing other projects. I have finished OpenBook 2, and now I have to decide what to do with FuzzyCat. It is a free and open source project, so I could potentially draw on other developers, but coordinating that is also time-consuming. I have also considered that OpenURL technology may be the better overall solution for exposing library catalogues to the web, as I did with OpenBook 2. So, the FuzzyCat project is being shelved indefinitely. If there is interest in reviving the project, I would be interested in talking about it. Till then, FuzzyCat, adieu.