Andornot’s popular WebPublisher RSS Control has long allowed our clients to generate an RSS feed of any content from any textbase. Just recently, we configured our RSS control to work with a Genie Catalog. Since Inmagic WebPublisher PRO underlies Genie, it was relatively easy to make the RSS control play nicely with Genie. Generating the RSS feed via a query into WebPublisher is done in the same way, but the tricky part was having the link in the RSS feed take the user into the Genie OPAC, as though the user had searched there.

We’ve configured an example RSS feed here from our Genie demo (best viewed in an RSS reader or as an RSS feed in Outlook).

RSS is an effective way of sharing information with broad audience. Some great ideas for feeds include:

• a feed of the latest items added to the catalog;
• a feed of items on particular subjects or by favourite (or in-house) authors; and
• a feed of the latest serials checked-in.

Please contact us to use the Andornot RSS control with your Genie system.

The Law Society of Saskatchewan is the latest Andornot client to launch Genie (part of the Inmagic DB/Text Library Suite).

The Law Society Library is a long-time Inmagic user, with several textbases used to manage books, journals, legal resources, and other materials. These databases are maintained in the Society’s two main offices in Regina and Saskatoon, with online access for society members through the society's website.

One of the challenges facing the library was managing all of these databases from separate locations. "We were looking for any way to streamline our core tasks of acquisitions and circulation by eliminating double and sometimes triple data entry and the never-ending battle of syncing databases," says Toby Willis-Camp, Director of Libraries at the Law Society. The library selected Genie as a solution, as it provides a single, central, web-based system for all the core library functions. The library also opted to have Andornot host both the Genie system, as well as the entire society website, with its members-only resources and other searchable databases.

Andornot and the staff in the Law Society Library planned and completed a conversion of several Inmagic databases into the Genie system, with special attention paid to de-duplicating records from similar source databases.

While the library staff use the Genie Catalogue, Orders, Serials and other "back-end" modules for their day-to-day work, a new search interface for society members and the public was created, based on the Andornot Starter Kit. This OPAC features:

• quick and advanced search screens for all library materials;
• a specific search screen for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) materials;
• the full text of CPD materials, with a link from the record to a PDF of the material, for immediate online access;
• tick boxes allow society members to mark items as they find them, then submit a request to the library for those materials, or email a copy of the list to themselves or a colleague, or save or print the list; and
• icons in the search results to help users more easily identify the types of materials in their search results. Different icons appear for books, journals, websites, DVDs and CPD materials.

"Every time I use the OPAC I break out into a huge smile, because I am so pleased with how it's working and presents the information.  I am absolutely ecstatic about the 'public face' we now present," says Willis-Camp.

Members of the Law Society register in a different online system, but thanks to a behind-the-scenes transfer of information into Genie on a regular basis, the Genie Borrowers database is always up to date with society members.

"It was a year filled with immense change at the Library.  Working with Andornot made most of those changes go more smoothly.  We are looking forward to using Genie at its full potential, and continuing to improve and expand our web presence with Andornot's expert assistance." says Willis-Camp.

Please contact Andornot for more information on Genie, the Andornot Starter Kit, and our hosting and consulting services.

Although our website may look much the same, we have recently made radical changes behind the scenes.  We have switched to using a Content Management System (CMS) to allow us to better maintain the website, simplify editing and keep track of all changes.  We are using Umbraco, an open source CMS based on Microsoft’s ASP.NET.   Moving the site content over was easy, as Umbraco has a WYSIWYG editor and we were simply able to copy and paste the pages.  We made some edits as we went along and re-arranged the navigation so you may find pages you had bookmarked have moved or that you are redirected to new sections.  As anyone maintaining a website knows, upkeep is an ongoing process. Umbraco features great tools for saving drafts for review by others; the ability to publish and unpublish pages on set dates; and captures all edits so that pages can be rolled back if needed.

As part of the migration we also made changes to our blogs and instead of using Blogger we have switched to BlogEngine.Net. Our blogs are the most visited section of our site and this has allowed us to offer  more functionality with a categorized and easily searchable archive. We are also starting to integrate RSS feeds from the various blog categories into pages on our site, so that for example our page about Inmagic Genie will automatically update with the latest blog posts tagged as relating to Genie. Our Twitter feed now appears on our blog page.

One of our core areas of expertise is integrating Inmagic WebPublisher PRO search and results screens into a site template, so we of course made sure that the various pages on our site that include records from our database of sites using Inmagic software also seamlessly fit within our new Umbraco template.

We are thrilled with the functionality and ease of use of Umbraco and are now offering Umbraco site design and hosting to clients interested in updating their website or creating a new one. Please contact us to discuss possibilities and pricing.

We also always welcome any comments on our website, especially topics that you would like to see included.

In their latest newsletter, Inmagic reseller Maxus of Australia reports on a client developing an export from Inmagic Genie to the EndNote bibliographic citation software.  This is using the new functionality to add extra reports to the InfoCart which was introduced in service pack 1 for Genie version 3.3.

“Many Inmagic textbases contain bibliographic records for items that users wish to cite when preparing conference papers or other reports. EndNote is one of the citation tools that is widely used for this purpose and we have often been asked whether it is possible to transfer data from Inmagic textbases into EndNote. Until recently the only way we were aware of to do this was to export a comma delimited file of the required records, that EndNote could import.

However, when Jenny Ward, Information Officer at Women’s Health Victoria asked about users being able to do this from the WHV Genie Catalogue recently, we realised that a new approach was required. In her training on the use of EndNote, Jenny learned that one of the EndNote import formats could be readily reproduced as a Genie report, so she went ahead and designed exactly that report.

We were then able to add the report as an option in the Genie InfoCart activity list. Users can now search in Genie, save the required records into the Cart, then use the Cart to list the items in a report from which the set of citations can be copied into a text file and imported into EndNote. It’s a neat solution.

See it in action in the WHV catalogue at http://resources.whv.org.au/InmagicGenie/opac.aspx.

After searching for some items, click “Add to Cart” for one or two, then click the Cart link to open the Cart.  Select Plain Text Tagged in the drop down list, then click Go to see the resulting page, from which records can be saved.”

Please contact us if you need consulting assistance to add extra reports such as this to your Inmagic Genie implementation.

It's not obvious how to get *just* files modified since a given revision when using TortoiseSVN against a Subversion source control repository, and it's often handy to do so. I do it to send client updates, for instance, since there may have been numerous commits since it was last deployed and sometimes I just want the diffs, not the entire project.

So here is how to get only the files modified since a given revision, with folder structure intact.

1. On top-level folder, right-click and TortoiseSVN --> Show log.
2. From the list of revisions, select all back to, but not including, the last revision that was deployed (to ensure you get just files changed *since* that revision).
3. Right-click on the selections and Compare revisions.
4. Now you're looking at a list of files modified since that last deployment revision. Select all, right-click and Export selection to...
5. Choose a folder to export to in the folder browser dialog.

Now you have just the files you want, exported and preserved in their folder hierarchy.