I agree, a way to mash up Drupal and OPACs effectively would be great. There are several approaches. The first is to use Z39.50 to connect to library systems. Work has already been done on this, for example http://drupal.org/project/z3950 (and my OPAC client mentioned in the PHP/YAZ thread would be another place to start as well). The problem with this approach is the overhead of Z39.50 and the vagaries of how well it is supported by various library system vendors.
The second approach is to load the records from a library system into Drupal. Scriblio (http://about.scriblio.net/) pioneered this with Wordpress. A related approach is to use Solr to index records dumped from a library system and integrate the Solr search into Drupal. I have seen a prototype of this approach and it looks good. I'll contact the developer to make sure he sees this thread.
Some commercial systems have proprietary APIs that could be used to provide a Drupal front end to their catalogues (see http://www.aadl.org/ for example, which uses one of these proprietary APIs to do just that), but they are all different from one another.
In any approach, we'd need to integrate individual records from the library system into Drupal so users could take advantage of Drupal's node system and all the wonderful modules that use a node-based data model. Having a user search a library catalogue from within a Drupal website but not enabling them to save records, comment on them, rate them, apply tags to them, etc. seems a bit disappointing.
This is an awesome idea and I encourage others to pitch in their $0.02 so we can hammer out some functional requirements, at least.
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Several approaches
It looks like someone else is interested in integrating Koha and Drupal (http://drupal.org/node/117160) as well.
I agree, a way to mash up Drupal and OPACs effectively would be great. There are several approaches. The first is to use Z39.50 to connect to library systems. Work has already been done on this, for example http://drupal.org/project/z3950 (and my OPAC client mentioned in the PHP/YAZ thread would be another place to start as well). The problem with this approach is the overhead of Z39.50 and the vagaries of how well it is supported by various library system vendors.
The second approach is to load the records from a library system into Drupal. Scriblio (http://about.scriblio.net/) pioneered this with Wordpress. A related approach is to use Solr to index records dumped from a library system and integrate the Solr search into Drupal. I have seen a prototype of this approach and it looks good. I'll contact the developer to make sure he sees this thread.
Some commercial systems have proprietary APIs that could be used to provide a Drupal front end to their catalogues (see http://www.aadl.org/ for example, which uses one of these proprietary APIs to do just that), but they are all different from one another.
In any approach, we'd need to integrate individual records from the library system into Drupal so users could take advantage of Drupal's node system and all the wonderful modules that use a node-based data model. Having a user search a library catalogue from within a Drupal website but not enabling them to save records, comment on them, rate them, apply tags to them, etc. seems a bit disappointing.
This is an awesome idea and I encourage others to pitch in their $0.02 so we can hammer out some functional requirements, at least.