Serving Up Dynamic Web Pages with Cold Fusion: UCLA Biomedical Library E-Journals

By Randy Ahn, Reference Librarian
rahn@library.ucla.edu

Managing electronic journals poses challenges not only from a collection development/acquisitions perspective, but from a technological one as well. Unannounced changes in subscriptions, URL redirections, and publisher web site crashes can result in broken links to journals which may go unnoticed by staff until a client complains that a previously available journal is lost in cyberspace. When the Biomedical Library webmasters were originally approached to work on this and other related issues, the bibliographic records contained in UCLA's OPAC had no fields for entering e-journal information. Instead all e-journals were simply listed on various static web pages which clients had to examine one by one in order to find the title they wanted. Because of the frequent changes in electronic subscriptions, webmasters found it necessary to update the static pages on a continual basis — there was no easy way to maintain the collection without a steady vigilance.

If you have experienced any of these scenarios as we did at the UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library, then you'll appreciate why we wanted to develop a system in which we could easily update electronic records without the need to alter basic HTML page formatting — a time consuming job. We also wanted to provide search capabilities on our web page, since the original list of electronic journals had grown to almost 4,000 titles. And finally, our collection development division requested that we develop a method for tracking e-journal usage since traditional methods for collecting data were not applicable. (We settled on creating a simple hit counter.) With these goals in mind (centralizing data management, providing a search interface, and tracking usage via a hit counter) we soon realized that our project involved the design and implementation of a mini-OPAC for electronic journals. We began to explore different technologies and applications that would allow us to build and easily maintain a database of electronic records.

After reviewing the options (perl-cgi, ASP, and other middleware programs) we decided to pursue Allaire's Cold Fusion solution. We chose Cold Fusion because it was platform independent, scalable, and relatively easy to learn. Cold Fusion is software that in conjunction with your existing web server processes web pages containing Cold Fusion Markup Language (CFML). CFML makes it possible for clients to query a database and see the results of their search rendered in HTML. For webmasters, Cold Fusion makes managing an electronic collection easier and more efficient than scripting static pages.

Because it is a tag-based language, Cold Fusion is appealing for those already familiar with HTML who want to build dynamic pages. It is even possible to create powerful Cold Fusion templates using just a few tags. The tag below queries a database called "electronicJournals" and returns all the titles beginning with the letter "A."

<CFQUERY DATASOURCE="electronicJournals">

SELECT JournalTitle
FROM TableOfJournalTitles
WHERE (JournalTitle LIKE 'A%')

The letter "A" could easily be recoded to perform searches for any other letter or even keywords. Other tags can manipulate data, output results, and perform an assortment of useful tasks. Prior to the availability of applications like Cold Fusion, one had to be a programmer to access database objects from a web page. Today, librarians with minimal programming skills can build useful information systems that will benefit their clients. Response to our system has been positive--our webmasters like the ease with which content can be changed; collection development likes the hit counter; and our clients appreciate having search features incorporated into web pages. We are already working on enhancing our system to include more powerful search features such as querying remote databases for data extraction. Starting with a simple system with proven stability gives you confidence to build more elaborate and ultimately more useful web pages. You can try our e-journal search from the Biomedical Library's homepage under "Locate Electronic Journals."

Here's a brief outline of how you can begin serving dynamic web content:

Step 1. Installation of Cold Fusion on Web Server

In order to run Cold Fusion, the application server must be installed on your web server. Cold Fusion runs on a variety of platforms — we have it installed with Windows NT Server and MS Internet Information Server. Allaire has a free version, Cold Fusion Express 4.5 (with limited capabilities) that you can download from their site. You'll want to upgrade to the professional edition if you choose to go live with your project.

Step 2. Create a Database

Creating a database is the next step in developing a Cold Fusion application. Cold Fusion works with most of the major databases on the market but we chose to use MS Access 97 for two reasons: First, MS Access was already installed on our workstations and second, creating tables in MS Access is relatively easy. MS Access is reportedly not as scalable or stable as other database products, but for our purposes it works well. Our initial database contained about 4,000 records on a single table. If you know how to create a database, you are ahead of the game.

Step 3. Create Cold Fusion Templates

Learning the Cold Fusion Markup Language does take some time. Allaire has a good training program; workshops are offered around the country on a rotating basis. It helps to attend one of these, but if you have some programming knowledge as I did, you can pick up a book and work through the tutorials. I've found the following books useful:

• Forta, Ben. Cold Fusion 4 Web Application Construction Kit. Indianapolis, Indiana: Que, 1998.
• Forta, Ben. Advanced Cold Fusion 4.0 Application Development. Indianapolis, Indiana: Que, 1999.

Step 4. Test, Debug, and Launch

I cannot say enough about the importance of testing your application prior to launch. Fortunately, at the Biomedical Library, we have enthusiastic testers who are adept at finding bugs in the system — moreover, including end users at all phases of your system design will ultimately decrease development time since the most important features will be thoroughly worked out early on.

Getting Support

Tips and tutorials regarding Cold Fusion can be found at the following websites:

• Allaire
• Cold Fusion Developer's Journal
• CFNewbie?.com
• CFTipsPlus.com
• Defusion.com
• Webmonkey.com

(Editor's note: If you have taken another approach or used other software to manage e-journals and would like to share this with your professional colleagues via Latitudes, we welcome your article contributions.)

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