We are working closely right now with SRSI Dynix and they have told us that the administrator in your consortium DOES have the URL structure that will take you directly to your online catalog’s record AND they also have the ability to customize your catalog to allow book reviews to show up directly in you catalog.

Because you are in a consortium, there may be some approval issues… HOWEVER, it is obvious that if a patron can conduct a search for a particular item JUST IN YOUR LIBRARY, there is a specific URL to that item as well (that is what the SRSL Dynix people tell me).

Brian, if you would provide me with the name and contact info of the person that is the “Admin” for SRSI for your consortium, I can verify all this directly with him/her. Giving them a head-up first would be a good thing too.

Thanks for your input!

Thanks for your comment on my blog – I am only slightly horrified to find that I put the link to my personal blog here….

The catch with us is that, since my consortium shares a catalog, individual libraries don’t have access to the code of the catalog pages to make changes like this. Also, it looks like if it is added to the catalog, it will show up for all libraries, whether they want it or not.

This will not fly in my consortium. We currently use SirsiDynix Horizon 7.3, which does pass a library code in the url. I’m sure this could be hijacked to show the Chili Fresh code only for certain libraries. Right now, though, I don’t think Chili Fresh does this, so the library/consortium would have to write that code.

I also asked about pricing, but didn’t get a complete answer. I think all the vagueness is due to them still being in beta, but hopefully they’ll have more concrete answers soon.

And you know, I suppose you could add this tool to your website (instead of the catalog) without affecting any other consortium libraries, but then you lose the advantage of the tool being in the catalog.