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Working with WebZ

Once you have installed WebZ and have tested the WebZ installation to ensure that it works properly, you are ready to customize WebZ to meet your needs. There are many customizations you can make to WebZ, and knowing just where to start may seem confusing. This topic describes the common customizations you can make to WebZ and provides links to topics that explain how to make the customizations.

The following table presents a list of customizations you will most likely want to make to the WebZ system. The list is by no means comprehensive, but it represents the most popular features of WebZ that you can customize in order to make WebZ work best for your organization.

Customization

Description of Topics

Configuring Access to Z39.50 Databases and Servers

This topic explains how to add a local or remote Z39.50 database to WebZ. Adding a database to WebZ allows users to search the database and retrieve results. When installed, WebZ is pre-configured to search several databases. You will likely want to add your own databases to WebZ or remove some or all of the pre-configured databases.

Modifying How Records are Displayed in the WebZ Interface

This group of topics describes how to customize the display of database records in the WebZ interface. When installed, WebZ includes a set of formatting classes that control how database records are formatted for display in the WebZ interface. The benefit of formatting classes is that they provide flexibility and control for working with database records. If you want to change the way database records are displayed in the interface, you will need to modify the formatting classes that were installed with WebZ, or create your own formatting classes.

Building Your WebZ Interface

This group of topics describes how the WebZ interface works, the tools that make the interface possible, and how you can customize various aspects of the interface to meet your needs. WebZ includes a pre-built starter interface called the Out-of-the-Box interface, or OBI. The OBI itself includes three different interface styles: default, red, and resource sharing. The default style of the OBI is the interface you see when you first install and run WebZ. You will likely want to re-style the overall look of the OBI (i.e., screen colors, graphics, fonts, messages) to suit your needs.

Setting Up Access Control

This topic describes how to configure the Access component to control user access to WebZ. When installed, the WebZ Access component is turned off. You must configure and activate the Access component if you wish to use its authorization and authentication features.

Setting Up ILL Services

This topic describes how to configure Inter-Library Loan (ILL) services in WebZ. When installed, WebZ's ILL feature is pre-configured for a subset of the databases included with WebZ, such as ABII and Worldcat. You can customize your own ILL service configurations within WebZ.

Configuring Vocabulary-Assisted Searching This topic describes how to configure vocabulary-assisted searching. Vocabulary-assisted searching uses a controlled vocabulary to improve the recall and precision of database searches. WebZ dynamically builds a list of related terms for a search term from a thesaurus database or a sample result set from the target database.


See Also

Introduction to WebZ
WebZ System Administration
WebZ System Information


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