Tag Archives: mbiblio

Aims and Objectives

Simply put, the main aim of this project is to look at the potential for smart phones to be used for the recording and organisation of bibliographic information for students within a library context.  In addition, the app developed will also provide useful usage information to the library.

Broadly, the main objectives of the project will be to look into what is and what is not currently possible.

This project is effectively looking at an area which has not been studied much before.  Some of the phone based technology necessary to test some of the ideas contained within the project is not yet widely available.  Therefore, as we progress through the project we will begin to get a much better idea of what is and isn’t feasible at the current time.  Once we’ve worked out the areas we can effectively develop, the primary objective will be to get a prototype service up and running which will be tested within one or two faculties at the University.

Primary sub-objectives will be to:

  • try and gauge whether students would actually utilise the technology were it to be made widely available (this will be based largely upon evaluating how useful the service will be to them)
  • look at the benefits (and costs) to the library itself.

Measuring the success of a project objectively  is often relatively problematic, especially for one which is only going to deliver a prototype service.  However, given that our objective is to deliver a service for both students and the library the success of this can relatively easily be measured. 

More important will be to try and quantify how useful the new service is, especially in relation to existing methodologies (pen and paper?? Endnote?? Endnote Web??).  We can obviously do this by evaluating the processes both parties employ currently (and gauging their satisfaction with these) versus their reaction to the service we provide.  Therefore, if a student using our app says they will never again go back to writing their references by hand because the app makes it so much easier and more reliable, we’ll know we’ve cracked it.

Validating barcode numbers

It would be great if the app could send a barcode number to the web service without the user being forced to decide upfront what kind of barcode is being sent, e.g. a barcode used by the library or an ISBN number. Clearly, the service needs to know what kind of number it is dealing with to make a sensible decision on what bibliographic source to query.

I’m exploring the use of validators to help the service to determine what type of value we are dealing with. At the moment, the interface is pretty simple:

public interface Validator {
    boolean validate(final String value);
}

Basically, an implementation would take a value and determine whether or not it believes it is valid. The first implementation developed covers the barcode numbers used by the Library at the University of Bristol.

Barcodes at the University are ten digits long and follow the following format:

  • The first digit is the prefix and is always the number 1
  • The second through to the 9th digit will be from the range 0 to 9.
  • The tenth digit is the check digit and can range from 0 to 9 or be the character X

The validator can therefore declare any value it receives that is not 10 digits in length as invalid. It can also dismiss any 10 digit numbers that don’t start with 1. Beyond that we need to apply an algorithm that determines the validity of the check digit (tenth digit) against the other numbers (excluding the prefix).

Each number is multiplied against a relevant weighting in the following list: {7, 8, 4, 6, 3, 5, 2, 1}. Modulus 11 is then used on the sum of the weighted values to get a remainder. The remainder is then subtracted against 11 to get the check digit value. If the value is 10, then that is represented by the character X. Clear as mud?

So, for the barcode 1511075964, we ignore the prefix and multiply the next 8 digits against the appropriate number in the weightings list:

(5 x 7) + (1 x 8) + (1 x 4) + (0 x 6) + (7 x 3) + (5 x 5) + (9 x 2) + (6 x 1) = 117

Find the remainder:

117 % 11 = 7

Subtract from 11 to find the check digit:

11 – 7 = 4

Therefore, 1511075964 is a valid University barcode because the last number matches the check digit created by the algorithm.

ISBN 10 numbers have ten digits but use a different weighting to calculate the check digit. It will be interesting to calculate the probability of a clash – the possibility of a number being a valid University barcode number and a valid ISBN 10 number.

Technical Architecture

For the mobile application to obtain citation information, it needs to be able to associate a physical item (such as a book) to the relevant bibliographic information. We plan to provide a RESTful service that can take a lookup value, such as a barcode number, and then search bibliographic sources for useful data for the user. For example, in the case of our library stock, each item has a barcode number that can be used as a unique identifier to search our library catalogue, Aleph.

It is better to provide a intermediate service rather than allowing the application to query Aleph directly. It will be easier to extend the service to support different and multiple bibliographic sources without having to update the application on the phone. The service will just continue to return data in a format that the application understands.

The service can also be used to store and query the usage statistics that are of interest to the library staff.

Below is a diagram of the planned architecture:

Proposed architecture

I’ve already made a modest start on the development of the service, by querying Aleph through the X-Service API for details of a item via a barcode lookup. For those interested, I’m using JAX-RS (Jersey) to provide the RESTful service and the Spring Application Framework for dependency injection.