Re: [VuFind-General] long term direction

[Mark T. <mt...@nl...>]

Sorry for being slow to respond to this, but I just thought I'd chime
in.

Ya'aqov Ziso <zi...@ro...> writes:

> No intention to spoil our users and our fun with vuFIND. Just taking stock after 1-2 years of working with vuFIND, here are few general questions,
>
>
>  1.  1s vuFIND primarily an experiment? if not why haven’t more sites
>      switched to production like VU or NLA?

It's a year to the day that our VuFind installation replaced our
previous Voyager OPAC.  As other people have said, I suspect the lack of
a 1.0 release might be scaring people from taking the next step, and
something like this does require some level of support from IT staff.
That said, I think that switching your delivery system is more than just
a technical challenge, so it's understandable that we haven't seen
everyone rush to switch.


>  2.  Is SOLR indexing satisfactory?

I think Solr is fantastic, and very well-suited to the sorts of things
that VuFind uses it for.  Faceting performance seems great under the
latest nightly builds, and where we've felt the need to be a little more
adventurous than regular search and faceting (with things like our
browse functionality, linking to full-text resources and incorporating
bibliographies from the Australian Dictionary of Biography) we've had no
trouble writing new Solr request handlers, so extensibility doesn't seem
to be an issue either.


>  3.  how many staff are needed for vuFIND’s viable maintenance? for
>      developping/adding features?

Our team currently consists of three active members: one developer (me)
and two library/cataloguing/common sense experts.  None of us works
full-time on our catalogue--we all have other responsibilities that
occupy most of our time.  We generally add a few new features each
month, along with a fairly continuous stream of improvements behind the
scenes.


>  4.  do we want vuFIND to measure up to the ILS (Voyager, Aleph, III,
>      etc.) OPAC, or like it as an alternative, for its discovery
>      tools?

I generally think it's a question of these ILS OPACs measuring up to
VuFind.  I think VuFind has pretty much raised the bar in the world of
OPACs.


>  5.  what is the plan B at your institution for when the vuFIND guru
>      leaves?

I imagine it's similar to the plan for when our Voyager guru leaves.
Library knowledge and IT skills are a rare mix, but I don't think that's
a problem that is particular to VuFind...


>  7.  which collections, other than the catalog and OAI/repositories
>      have we added ? which API to other collections have we installed?

We've integrated other sources of data where it was not too difficult to
do so.  As I mentioned, we've incorporated biographies from the
Australian Dictionary of Biography:

  http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Search/Home?lookfor=author:"Cook,+James,+1728-1779"&iknowwhatimean=1

We also show possibly-relevant full-text resources (from Open Library,
Hathi Trust and Project Gutenberg) and our finding aids in our search
results pages.  VuFind and Solr are very malleable if you're willing to
dig in.

Cheers,

Mark

-- 
Mark Triggs
Systems Administrator, The National Library of Australia
<mt...@nl...>