On Friday, May 04, 2007 11:57 AM Mark Andrews, Creighton University
asked:
>Just curious, but how's the Endeca-based union catalog coming at FCLA?
Please forgive the length of this post, but you did ask. ;-)
Although the FCLA Endeca Union Catalog isn't yet a production service,
it is available for anyone to preview at http://catalog.fcla.edu/. It
includes all records from the 11 separate library catalogs of the State
University Libraries (SUL) of Florida (although new BIB records are
currently being added only weekly). The approximately 14 million total
records in these separate catalogs are being de-duped (and some fields
merged) so that the number of master records in FCLA Endeca is
7,038,250.
One point worth emphasizing is that while new BIB records are not
immediately available in the Endeca OPAC, the ITEM information displayed
there (including circulation status) is being retrieved in real-time
from the underlying Oracle data in our Aleph system databases (rather
than being static data loaded into Endeca). This is very cool!
A statewide OPAC committee is meeting constantly by email (and weekly by
conference call) with FCLA staff to refine the system before it is
implemented this summer. Some usability testing has been conducted to
inform decisions. The interface and system functionality will continue
to evolve as we and our users gain experience with this new catalog and
as the FCLA staff learns more about how to utilize the considerable
power we are finding is available in the Endeca software.
In fact, this ability to once again have better control over the
presentation of our catalog data is one of the things we are looking
most forward to. For example, we have really missed not being able to
display due date information on the initial Results List since we
migrated from our FCLA-developed WebLUIS interface (that was built on
top of NOTIS) to Ex Libris Aleph; now we can (and do) through Endeca.
Hooray! A basic, user-friendly, feature is being returned from exile.
:-)
A new production server for Endeca was recently installed. A load
testing event is being planned shortly to try to insure that response
time will be good during times when many users are accessing the system
concurrently. A "soft launch" is expected to occur shortly after this
event (assuming it goes well).
Actually, the creation of a Union Catalog for the Endeca OPAC initiative
is something of a "side benefit"; what we really wanted were better
local OPACS. These separate institutional catalogs based on the master
Union Catalog records are also now available for SUL staff preview;
these are being used for the usability testing (a local view thought to
be far preferable to a union view when assessing user interest and
usability). These localized interfaces also include the additional
ability for users to sign in to renew items online and to request items
for recall (again through real-time interaction with the underlying
Oracle data in our Aleph system). Quickly narrowing results to local
library locations is an additional facet available there. A link to
quickly perform the same search done locally in the Union Catalog (by
just clicking to opening a new window with the search results displayed
there) now exists. Access to these local interfaces should be able to be
advertised on NGC4LIB soon.
During this coming July-October FCLA will be upgrading our 11 Ex Libris
Aleph systems from Version 15.5 to Version 18 (a pretty "huge"
undertaking that is to be accomplished concurrently with the pretty
"huge" Endeca project). As each institution is upgraded, the plan is to
rely on the new Endeca OPAC as the primary user interface to our library
catalog data, so getting these available and generally stable in advance
of the Aleph upgrade is a high priority. While there will continue to be
institutional Aleph OPACS after the Aleph uprade, these are not being
significantly customized over what comes "out of the box" from Ex
Libris. The Aleph OPAC will likely continue to be used by library staff
for certain searches that are of little interest to average users. The
goal is to ultimately have no dependence on the Aleph OPAC for any
public user needs.
The initial FCLA prototype benefitted greatly from North Carolina State
University's willingness to share the configuration files that they had
developed for their Endeca-based catalog. And while there are still many
similarities in the NCSU and FCLA user interfaces, the projects have
really been quite different. FCLA has had to build a lot on top of the
trailblazing product NCSU provided as a starting point in order to deal
with our very different multi-institution environment. Some of these
differences are listed in an FAQ at
http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/sulopac/endeca/faq.html#differences.
The full FAQ about the FCLA Endeca OPAC project is available at
http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/sulopac/endeca/faq.html.
I think that most of us that have closely followed the SUL OPAC
interface evolution in the past decade are really quite optimistic about
the Endeca platform becoming a much more user-oriented OPAC than we now
offer -- one that definitely enables exposing catalog records to users
in ways never before possible. But we don't have any illusions that it
will be without some flaws initially (no matter how much testing is done
in advance). However, as was the case with FCLA's development of a Web
interface for our old NOTIS system, we expect to move forward
incrementally. Knowing that we now have a platform on which we may make
this incremental progress (and in a reasonable timeframe) is an exciting
prospect!
Rich Bennett
E-Access Services Coordinator
University of Florida Libraries
richben_at_ufl.edu
352.392.6428
Received on Sat May 05 2007 - 07:36:30 EDT