Photo of a tent on top of Mt Frederick, Grampians NP.

Serra Explorer v2 RC is here!

Serra Explorer is a proof of concept tool that demonstrates how metadata from a library catalogue can be collected and re-purposed using an iPhone or iPad. If your library catalogue is driven by Sierra, feel free to download this and have a play.

31/10/2017: The discovery of a vulnerability with barcode searching in Webpac has seen this function disabled on our catalogue. The iPhone interface of this “app” was geared specifically for listing items by searching barcodes so this is useless now. All other functionality shouldn’t be affected.

The database made a brief appearance at VALA 2014 but version 1 was never released. This version is a complete rewrite with more field mappings and even more data clean up functions and thanks to new features in Filemaker Go. A number of interfaces are included within a single file and while all of them can be accessed by any device, the built in scripts only use screens intended for the specific device being used. The iPhone “version” is intended primarily as a tool for quickly creating a list of items and emailing the list as a spreadsheet.

There isn’t a typo in the name. The Serra Range is a low range of mountains in the southern Grampians National Park. It is home to some of the most inhospitable scrub that will entangle, cut and scratch anyone attempting to take a shortcut through the bush. Attempting to extract, clean and remap Marc metadata from Sierra to XMP metadata to be embedded into digitised items has been equally tortuous at times ;-).

Watch it in action

Serra Explorer 2 (Release candidate) from UoM Digitisation Service

Features

Scan bacodes or search manually
Use your device's camera as a barcode scanner to automatically look up a record or search using the catalogues web interface
Explore metadata
View the metadata in a variety of formats including:
- the catalogue's web interface
- raw xml
- a flattened individual parsed subfields
- cleaned and remapped descriptive metadata
Create and share lists
- Choose which items to add to your list or automatically add items as you scan the barcodes.
- Create a packing list as you're boxing up the items to ensure your list is accurate
- Email a spreadsheet of cleaned metadata directly to the recipient as soon as you've finished.
Supplement metadata from related fields
Build up a description from any relevant notes fields or choose which of the "other authors" actually contributed to the creation of the item.
Search other libraries
Theoretically* this should work with any other library catalogue running Sierra. Switching between catalogues is as simple as changing the URL to the catalogue and a short list of other university catalogues has been added. While you obviously can't scan their barcodes without visiting the libraries you can still test out the the catalogue search functions.

*Almost every other library metadata standard has its fair share of quirks and exceptions. If the app fails please let me know.