From: Demian K. <dem...@vi...> - 2010-09-27 13:01:21
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Hello, First, the good news: you are correct that VuFind should take care of all of your searching needs, and the way VuFind interfaces with ILS systems is fairly straightforward, so it's not too hard to hook it to another piece of software. You just implement a driver as described at http://vufind.org/wiki/building_an_ils_driver (and please feel free to ask further questions here if you have any). Now the bad news: I'm inclined to agree with Greg that a home-grown system may not be your best option. As you say, the basic tasks (tracking books, patrons and checkouts) are pretty straightforward, but unless you have the power to force things to stay simple, it may become a headache to maintain a system by yourself in the long term, as complicated rules and exceptions seem to have a way of infiltrating library systems over time. You know your situation better than we do, though, so we could be wrong. I was going to suggest Koha as the most obvious option since it is relatively lightweight... but Markus' words of warning probably carry more weight than my suggestion, since he has direct experience and I do not. He is also correct that the current Koha driver packaged with VuFind doesn't actually work. It's a relic from a long time ago that never got updated when VuFind's structure changed, and it would be non-trivial to bring it up to date (or else someone would probably have done it by now). Evergreen seems like overkill for your situation - it's a very heavy-weight system, and I at least found it a bit difficult to get an instance running when I tried to test it out - but it does at least have a functional VuFind driver to the best of my knowledge. There is a third open source alternative: NewGenLib (http://www.verussolutions.biz/), which appears to be built using Java. Again, I have no first-hand experience with this system and haven't heard much about it outside of direct contact with its developers, but it has a working VuFind driver and may be a good match for a small library. It's at least worth taking a look before diving in and building something from the ground up. Good luck, and please let us know if we can do anything else to help! - Demian From: ... [mailto:off...@gm...] Sent: Saturday, September 25, 2010 7:15 PM To: vuf...@li... Subject: [VuFind-Tech] Whats involved in an ILS? We are a small school starting a library in conjunction with another local non-profit. I'm the sole tech guy, or at least the only devoted one. VuFind looks great from a couple demos I've seen so I'm looking at it some more. We are a brand new library, so we have no ILS already. I've looked at oss4lib to see what open source options are available and its pretty much evergreen and kohl. But I am wondering how much of what these large programs have really needs to be used by vufind. I was hoping to write something in python to build marc records of our catalog, check books in and out and keep track of library card holders. I assume vufind takes care of the searching of the records, given MARC records to search through. Is this true? The tasks I am thinking my program will have to do are not quite trivial, but certainly something one intermediate programmer could handle (with some help from friends and forums). Is this realistic? If not prohibitively difficult, I would like to write the simple ILS because our library will also keep track of book donors who have "checked books in" for library use, and who will be able to reclaim them. Probably the donor will designate how long the book should be in our system before we remind them that they can have it back if they miss it. I am pretty much the only "library staff", and very little administrative action need to happen. Is there any specific information I can look at about what queries vufind will make of the ils, and what database management tasks are its job? thanks, Elliot |