Re: Open Source OPAC - VUFind Beta Released

From: Rong Tang <tang2_at_nyob>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2007 16:04:34 -0400
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
This is indeed a fascinating and interesting OPAC. After some initial
exploration, one thing that I found to be a little problematic is the
"Similar Items" Function.

While I was looking at the following record:

Chinese economic reform : the impact on security / edited by Gerald
Segal and Richard H. Yang.
Other Authors:  Segal, Gerald, | Yang, Richard H.
Published:  London ; Routledge, 1996.
Topics:  Military readiness - Economic aspects - China. | Defense
industries - China. | National security - China.
Geographic Areas:  China - Economic policy - 1976- | China - Foreign
relations - 1976-

And the "similar items" displayed on the right panel are:
A general purpose systolic array architecture using field programmable
gate arrays /
  Bilinear signal synthesis in array processing /
  1996 IEEE International Symposium on Phased Array Systems and
Technology : revolutionary developments in phased arrays : 15-18
October 1996, Boston, Massachusetts /
  Field-programmable logic and applications : 5th international
workshop, FPL '95, Oxford, United Kingdom, August 29 - September 1,
1995 : proceedings /
  A reduced dimension beam-space sidelobe canceller and direction
finding system /

There are some records the "similar items" function seem to work, but
still not very good. For instance, for the record:

Reform without liberalization :
China's National People's Congress and the politics of institutional change /
Kevin J. O'Brien.
Main Author:  O'Brien, Kevin J.
Published:  New York : Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Geographic Areas:  China - Politics and government - 1949-

The "similar items" are:
The proximate aim of education;
  Liberation : Marines in the recapture of Guam /
  American Catholics and social reform : the New Deal years ;
  The Italian Renaissance : the origins of intellectual and artistic
change before the Reformation /
  Reform and reaction in twentieth century American politics /

What was the similarity algorithm based on?

Thanks!
Rong

***************************************************************
Rong Tang, PhD
Assistant Professor
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
Simmons College
300 The Fenway
Boston, MA 02115
(Tel) 617-521-2880
(Fax) 617-521-3192
**************************************************************


Quoting Andrew Nagy <andrew.nagy_at_VILLANOVA.EDU>:

> 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 - 13:48:03 EDT