Andrew,
I've been playing around with the VuFind demo for a few minutes, and it
looks great. This sort of project will fill a valuable niche, freeing
libraries to experiment with an OPAC that doesn't suck without taking on
all of the risks of adopting a new ILS.
I realize that this is still a beta (alpha?), but I wanted to point out
a couple of bugs:
1. The APA citation of books is incorrect, missing some periods and
failing to abbreviate the first names of authors. Here's an example:
Robinson, Paul H.,Darley, John M. (1995) Justice, liability, and blame
:community views and the criminal law Boulder, Colo. : Westview Press,
2. The "Similar Items" book recommendation feature always seems to
recommend computer science books, regardless of the subject matter of
the book I'm looking at. Here are some of the recommendations for the
criminal justice book above:
# Book A general purpose systolic array architecture using field
programmable gate arrays /
# Book Bilinear signal synthesis in array processing /
# Book 1996 IEEE International Symposium on Phased Array Systems and
Technology : revolutionary developments in phased arrays : 15-18 October
1996, Boston, Massachusetts /
That said, because the VuFind is open source, I'm sure that these
problems will be resolved soon. If this was a product from a typical
ILS vendor, wee would wait years for a solution.
I applaud your effort, and I look forward to seeing VuFind develop into
an incredible catalog interface!
Thomas Arendall-Salvetti
Reference/Instruction Librarian
Langsdale Library
University of Baltimore
1420 Maryland Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21201
410-837-4275
tarendall-salvetti_at_ubalt.edu
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Andrew Nagy
Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2007 12:45 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: [BULK?] [NGC4LIB] Open Source OPAC - VUFind Beta Released
Sorry for the cross-posting
Hello All,
I am pleased to announce the release of our Next-Gen library catalog
browser, VuFind. It is now officially open source code under the GPL
and hosted on Sourceforge. We have been working on the application for
quite some time now, almost a year, and for the past few months have
been working with some local schools to test the application and begin
to build some install scripts.
Currently out of the box the software works with the Voyager catalog,
but we are working on adding additional drivers to work with your
favorite ILS! Even Evergreen and Koha! (If you would like to volunteer
to build an ILS Driver, we would highly appreciate the contribution.)
Some of you may recall my presentation at Code4Lib 2007 on our initial
efforts of the software using a Native XML Database. Now using the
power of Apache Solr, the speeds are astonishing and as we all know,
Apache Solr really does rock!
Please have a look at our project website to download the software and
you can even try out a live demo of the software:
http://www.vufind.org/
We are currently in a beta stage of development with the software but
hope to have all necessary functionality completed by the end of the
summer and have a stable production release by the Fall semester.
Please feel free to sign up for the mailing list to let us know any
thoughts you have on the project and please report any bugs you
encounter in testing, etc.
Enjoy!
Andrew
Received on Thu Jul 19 2007 - 11:23:11 EDT