New Books List on HealthLinks
Client
Details
The New Books List on HealthLinks was my first experience using Perl to solve a real problem. In 2005 the Health Sciences Library wanted to have a simple way of listing the newest health sciences books from the web catalog on the HealthLinks web site. They also wanted to use the list of titles generated from Innovative’s Millennium product rather than have to type in the titles by hand.
The solution we came up with was to have the staff upload the files generated by Millennium to a directory on HealthLinks. From there I used Perl to read the directory, gather the list of files, parse the latest file for the current week, and generate the HTML for the catalog information, complete with links back to the book entries in the catalog.
Having the staff upload generated files rather than typing in the information not only saved them hours of time but also acted as an input filter for the program. Thus, we could always guarantee consistent input which meant one less point of failure.
Skills Used
Perl, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, graphic design, user-centered design
What I Would Do Differently Today
A list of new and regularly updated items screams out “RSS feed!” to me. In the next version I would have the script generate an RSS feed so users don’t have to visit the web page to see what’s new, assuming Millennium doesn’t do this already.
