Re: [VuFind-General] Colorado State University VuFind instance

[Ogg,Dennis <Dennis.Ogg@ColoState.EDU>]

The "Catalog View" does go to our ILS and the "SOLR Record" is being blocked by the firewall and we should probably look at displaying this link for only the non-blocked IP addresses.  The main reasons these two addition links are on "Librarian View" tab are for debugging purposes, and to help to explain to folks that this is same data as is in the ILS.  Basically, it allows us to look at the MARC record as we have it in VuFind, the actually SOLR fields and their contents, and the ILS record, in a very quick, efficient manner.  And it does this without having to remember each time how to I get to the SOLR record or to the ILS record.  It was a great time saver when it came to solving indexing problems or explaining to librarians why an item was listed this way or why did this particular record come up in the results.

We have not considered direct SOLR queries from other network applications at this time.

Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: Barnett, Jeffrey [mailto:jef...@ya...] 
Sent: Thursday, September 17, 2009 12:28 PM
To: vuf...@li...; Ogg,Dennis
Subject: [VuFind-General] Colorado State University VuFind instance

Very impressive.  The number of different services and sources you have built into a single interface is very much in demand these days, and shows off the underlying flexibility of the vufind architecture nicely as well.

One question/observation: 
Under the "Librarian view" you offer the "Catalog View" and the "SOLR Record" in addition to the standard "MARC record".  The first seems to go to your ILS, and the second to the jetty/solr port (8080).  But the jetty link times out.  Is this intentional (actually recommended in the vufind install doc)?  Or is some other firewall/filter blocking the request by accident?  Have you considered/do you support direct solr queries from other network applications in addition to vufind ("discovery")?

-----Original Message-----

Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:53:58 -0600
From: "Ogg,Dennis" <Den...@co...>
Subject: [VuFind-General] Colorado State University VuFind instance
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At Colorado State University, we have recently gone live with our VuFind instance.  Several features that we have implemented may be of interest. First, in addition to our catalog, we indexed one of our digital repositories and the Library's web pages.  We now have two types of facets:   those that are applicable to all silos, and those that are silo-specific.  For example, title and author relate to all silos, whereas call number subjects and digital collections are specific to a particular silo.  We've implemented full-text indexes for our web pages using Nutch.  We also created full-text indexes for digital repository documents using ExLibris's APIs for DigiTool.  Catalog availability data is being extracted from our Innovative ILS using Z39.50.

                http://discovery.library.colostate.edu/

There have been a few issues that have caused us to deviate somewhat from the main trunk of VuFind.  The first of these was working with the Innovative catalog.   Automating data extraction and indexing, interpreting local catalog record customization, and retrieving availability information were big challenges. Substantial effort was also spent on adding the digital repository and web pages to our indexes.  Our library staff also provided various requests and restrictions.

Since we were very busy trying to get this implementation ready by the start of fall semester, we haven't been as active on the VuFind list as we would have liked.  However, we have been monitoring the list and have tried to help those people where we could offline, especially those with Innovative systems.  We will be working on a document in the near future that will attempt to list the issues we have encountered, describe what we did to solve them for our implementation, and hopefully present ideas for more generic solutions.

Dennis C. Ogg, Interim Coordinator
Research and Development Services
Colorado State University Libraries
Fort Collins, C0  80523-1019
970.491.4071
Dennis.Ogg@ColoState.EDU<mailto:Dennis.Ogg@ColoState.EDU>