CAB Direct 2.2: June 2010 enhancements In response to customer feedback we have made significant improvements to CAB Direct:
Marked Records
• Records now remain permanently marked throughout a user’s entire search session, remaining visible as a user moves from one search and set of search results to a new search and set of search results
• We have added a Marked Records area which remains open throughout a search session and enables users to select up to 1000 records for further manipulation, to print, export or email
• We have increased the limit for permanently saving records to 500 in MyCABDirect, the personalisation area where users are able to keep their own saved records and searches for future reference and to set up search alerts and RSS feeds.
• We have added options to print and email results as an attached text or html file
• Once a book or book chapter of interest is located in CAB Direct it’s now possible to locate that title on Amazon with a single click from the abstract in CAB Direct
Direct Export to RefWorks and EndNote
• In a long awaited development requested by many of our users, we have added one click direct export compatibility with two very popular web-based citation management and collaboration tools, RefWorks and EndNote Web. Users can now export citations or full abstracts from CAB Direct with one click on the export button, avoiding the hassle of needing to save the information first and then import.
Improved information on home page
• We have improved the display of information provided on our home page about institutional database subscriptions so that a single click on a database title now enables users to bring up all the latest records in that database and to use this to easily build up and refine their searches.
• In response to requests from customers, we have hidden the user’s IP information on the home page
XML gateway
• An important enhancement for researchers in academic libraries is an XML gateway for federated search connections, the CABDirect MXG handler which implements NISO Metasearch XML Gateway (MXG) level 1 protocol (
http://www.niso.org/publications/rp/RP-2006-02.pdf). The federated search connection will support simple and complex boolean queries for any search fields in CAB Direct, including author, title, subject, abstract, keyword, publication year.
The gateway handler is for CAB Direct can be found at
http://www.cabdirect.org/mxg/cabdirect
Compliant with Shibboleth 2.0
• In recent weeks has CAB Direct has also become compliant with Shibboleth 2.0 single sign on authentication and now provides institutional sign on for members of the UK Access Federation.
Upgrade of search engine to LuceneSolr 1.4.1
• LuceneSolr is the search engine which powers the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest
internet sites and it's also the search engine behind CAB Direct, capable of returning over eight million records in less than a tenth of a second. With the new upgrade of our platform we have updated to LuceneSolr 1.4.1, to ensure Solr continue to deliver optimum performance as our database approaches 9 million records.
Improved subject search
• We have extended the Subject Index to include broad terms assigned to abstracts; this will improve searches where the original article relates to a broad concept such as large geographic entity, for instance subject:Europe or animal families subject:coleoptera
Various bugs fixed
• The log in/log out button problems - new sessions can now be opened in the same browser after a user logs out of CABDirect
• The author’s affiliation and author’s e-mail address now appears in all outputs from CAB Direct
