Re: [VuFind-General] VUFind General Questions

[Andrew N. <and...@vi...>]

Philip - I will try to answer these as best I can.

From: vuf...@li... [mailto:vuf...@li...] On Behalf Of Philip Shafer
Sent: Friday, September 05, 2008 1:45 PM
To: vuf...@li...
Subject: [VuFind-General] VUFind General Questions

The following is a list of issues and question regarding the current VUFind release (0.8.2).  I hope the community can help answer some of these so we can determine the feasibility of launching VUFind in production this coming January:

We use ExLibris Voyager (6.5.4) for our ILS.

1.) Is there any information on when the VUFind 1.0 release will be available?
We hope in the next coming weeks.  I would like to wait for the official release of Solr 1.3 since it is speculated to be released fairly soon.

2.) If you perform a search, then from the search results page click on 'Course Reserves', when viewing an item in the course reseaves, the 'Back to Search' results link is being displayed.  I would expect this to Take you back to the previous page in the Course Reserves.  It's current behavior is taking the user back the the original search which was performed.
Hmm ... never noticed this.  I can put this on the queue to be fixed - but because this is not a major bug, I can't promise that this will be fixed soon.  Unless someone out there wants to fix this.
3.) Email Search is not working (Error Page is displayed).  Is this just a case where the feature is not implemented?  Are we responsible to implement this feature?  Is this a feature that will be complete and included in the 1.0 release?
This has been implemented in the current SVN.

4.) 'Cite This' does not seem to be implemented on the default install of 0.8.2?  Is this feature going to be implemented in the 1.0 release?
This has been implemented in the current SVN.

5.) Patron Login Not working.

I have successfully implemented the LDAP integration, however when a user log in, none of the user data is being populated from Voyager.  Is this going to be fixed with the 1.0 release in the Voyager Driver?  Can another Voyager library provide the methods to implement this feature?
This has been working for Voyager (AFAIK) since VuFind was released as open source.  Are you able to see holdings information for your records?

6.)  Paging links don't seem to be working.  We have currently provided a hack to get this working.  It looks like it was adding some of the url parameters in the links multiple times.  From what I gathered, page url parameters were being passed to Facets causing 'no results found' errors.
I think this problem is solved.  Paging works rather well with the current code in SVN.

7.) in (sys/SOLR.php) the 'getMoreLikeThis' (line 517) function is having difficulties parsing title queries with punctuation in them?  Is this being resolved in 1.0.  As I have found errors with certain punctuation characters, I have added them to the str_replace function, see below:

$query = '(title:(' . str_replace(array('&', ':', ';', '[', ']'), '', $record['title']) . ')^3';

I'm not sure how kosher this is, but it works.  One of our catalog titles was '[5 Aiken songs]', this function balked and returned no results.
This has been fixed in SVN.

8.) The 'Staff View' seems to not follow a format that our librarians are please with, they want something which looks more "traditional" (similar to the 'Librarians View' on the nla.gov.au implementation)?  Is this something being addressed, or are we to update this ourselves?

This has been fixed in SVN.
9.)  Are there any Voyager institutions willing to share their automation scripts for nightly export from voyager to VUFind (including updates and deletes)?

I've done 2 things to accomplish this.  1st - add the pmarcexport command to cron.  2nd - I have a script that copies the marc dump file from the voyager server to my vufind server and then runs the import.  There is really nothing to it.   I can try to add something to the wiki for others to use.
10.)  What, if any, are the impacts of upgrading to Voyager 7?  I know an upgrade is on our radar, and we're pushing it off until we know that the Voyager driver will work with Voyager 7?  Are there any institutions running VUFind with Voyager 7?  Is there a separate driver being developed for this?
We don't have Voyager 7 yet so I don't have anything to test against.

I know this is a long laundry list of questions, and all input we receive will be greatly appreciated.  This a great product and our institution is eager to get this up and running in the spring semester.

Good luck and feel free to follow up to the community with any other questions

Andrew