Full text indexing HOLLIS: a hacky mashup

This project comes from an amateur, not from the excellent devs here at the Lab. I’m a co-director, not a developer. If you look at the code (github) you will have a good laugh. On the other hand, the fact that someone at my level of “skill” can create a semi-workable piece of code is a testament to LibraryCloud’s usability. (Also to Paul Deschner’s patience with my questions. Thanks, Paul.)

Harvard Library has 13M items in its collection. Harvard is digitizing many of them, but as of now you cannot do a full text search of them.

Google Books had 30M books digitized as of a year ago. You can do full-text searches of them.

So, I wrote a little mash-up app that lets you search Google Books for text, and then matches up the results with books in Harvard Library.

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CURIOSity for collections

Edited to incorporate suggestions from Wendy.

Wendy Gogel says says a few factors led to this proposal for a new service:

  • Preservation Services, Academic Technology Services, and Library Technology Services have gotten inquiries about online collection building for faculty, librarians and other staff.

  • We need to replace our aging online collection building tools: Virtual Collections and TED

  • We’ve been creating digital content for 15 years at Harvard, so now have a good foundation for combining and presenting collections in new ways. The new service would be called CURIOSity, and, as Wendy notes, it does not exist yet.

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