Voyager (library Program) - Internals

Internals

Voyager uses Oracle as its database. For the web server side of things, it uses Apache Tomcat. For certain aspects of its reporting, it uses Perl scripts. As stated above, for its modules it uses custom Microsoft Windows programs.

There is no programming API to Voyager as such. The Voyager web server does provide a limited number of XML services and web APIs for integration purposes.

For ordinary workers, the only window into Voyager is via the exposed tables of the Voyager database. The Access Reports frontend to this database provides dozens of pre-built SQL queries written by Endeavor to help library workers. It is also possible to write software that connects directly to the database and reads the tables from there. However none of the indexing that makes Web Voyager so fast is exposed for the ordinary programmer.

The tables of Voyager are short-hand versions of the MARC records of the books. The actual MARC is stored as BLOBs but certain portions of the MARC are actual tables. For example, BIB_TEXT.TITLE is, naturally, the MARC Bibliographic Record field that holds the Title. The Bibliographic Records are stored in tables named BIB*. The Holdings records are in tables named MFHD* (Marc Format for Holdings Data). The Authority Records are in AUTH.

Voyager adds its own record, called the 'Item Record'. This stores the barcode, 'media type', location, and other information. The result of this is that there can be some redundant pieces of information in the database, particularly 'location' and 'media type'.