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In 2011, responding to growing internal and external need, the library has developed a web based knowledge base management system, KnowBot, in Ruby on Rail. KnowBot offers public searching, rating, cloud tagging, librarian, and reporting interfaces. With the additional public interfaces, it also extended reference services 24/7. Librarians can record responses to questions with graphics and multimedia. The reporting interface features not only the simple transactional data, but it also exhibits multi-dimensional analytic tool in real time.
== Creating a (mostly) integrated Patron Account with SirsiDynix Symphony and ILLiad ==
* Emily Lynema, North Carolina State University Libraries, ejlynema AT ncsu DOT edu
* Jason Raitz, North Carolina State University Libraries, jcraitz AT ncsu DOT edu
In 2012, the NCSU Libraries at long last replaced a vendor “my account” tool that had been running unsupported for years. With the opportunity to create something new, one of the initial goals was a user experience that more seamlessly combined ILS data from SirsiDynix Symphony with ILL data from ILLiad. As a Kuali OLE beta partner, the NCSU Libraries is looking at an ILS migration within the next few years, so another goal was to build the interface on top of a standard so it would not have to be re-written at part of the migration. And the icing on the cake was a transition from a local Perl-based authentication system to the newer campus-wide Shibboleth authentication.
This presentation will start with our design goals for a new user interface, include a demonstration, and describe the simple techniques used to provide a more integrated view of Symphony and ILLiad patron data. The backbone of the actual application includes light-weight use of Zend studio for PHP and integration of the eXtensible Catalog’s NCIP Toolkit to reach out to Symphony for patron data. In addition, we can talk about our successes (and difficulties) using jQuery Mobile to create a mobile view using the same underlying code as the web version. As one of our first Shibboleth applications here in the Libraries, this experience also taught us first-hand about some of the challenges of this type of single sign-on.
[[Category:Code4Lib2013]]