VuFind 1.0 has been released. VuFind is an open source resource discovery system.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
VuFind's long beta period is now over. Today, VuFind 1.0 has been released. In addition to improved stability, the new release includes several features missing from the previous release candidate: flexible support for non-MARC metadata formats, a mobile interface, Dewey Decimal support, integration with Serials Solutions' Summon, and more!
Nancy Fried Foster has self-archived XC User Research Preliminary Report in UR Research.
Here's the abstract:
This report summarizes the objectives, methods, and major software design findings from the data collected in the user research portion of the eXtensible Catalog (XC) project. A full analysis and interpretation of the data is not included here and will be provided at the conclusion of the project. This report includes edited results from the brainstorming sessions and a list of the features that emerged from the analysis of those results.
The University of Calgary has become a beta development partner for Serials Solutions' Summon unified discovery service.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest, has added University of Calgary as a beta development partner for the Summon™ unified discovery service. A variety of new content providers, including BMJ, an international peer-reviewed medical journal and subsidiary of the British Medical Association have also signed onto the Summon™ service. BMJ joins nearly 100 content providers along with key partners ProQuest and Gale–aggregators representing more than 4,700 publishers.
The Summon™ service is a pioneer in creating Google-like searching of the full breadth of content found in library collections. In the case of University of Calgary, library archives and museum collections will be integrated too, enabling users to find books and videos, e-resources at the article level, as well as manuscripts and artifacts, all from a simple, obvious starting point.
"We are a unique cultural institution supporting research, a museum, a university press, along with archives and special collections," said Tom Hickerson, Vice Provost and University Librarian, Libraries and Cultural Resources, at University of Calgary. "We've been actively searching for ways to provide integrated access to the diversity of our resources, enhancing discovery of an entirely new spectrum of information. I'm optimistic that the Summon service is the mechanism that can do that."
The goal of the Summon™ service is to not only bring the user back to the library as the starting place for research, but to also provide a channel for greater return on the library's content investment. The role of the beta partners is to ensure the service is tracking against those goals, providing feedback from the field. University of Calgary librarians, archivists and curators will initially test and use the Summon™ service. Then, they will move it to an open beta in May, getting feedback from faculty and student users. Other partners who are already testing include Dartmouth College, Oklahoma State University, University of Sydney, University of Liverpool and Western Michigan University
The Digital Library Federation has released DLF ILS Discovery Interface Task Group (ILS-DI) Technical Recommendation: An API for Effective Interoperation between Integrated Library Systems and External Discovery Applications.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
This document recommends standard interfaces for integrating the data and services of the Integrated Library System (ILS) with new applications supporting user discovery. Such standard interfaces will allow libraries to deploy new discovery services to meet ever-growing user expectations in the Web 2.0 era, take full advantage of advanced ILS data management and services, and encourage a strong, innovative community and marketplace in next-generation library management and discovery applications.
A group of eight professionals from major North American research libraries prepared the recommendation during late 2007 and early 2008. Members of the group surveyed the library community about their needs, made presentations, and held open discussions face to face and online with librarians, developers, and vendors. The group made multiple recommendation drafts and other background information publicly available on the task group's Wiki, and invited comments and suggestions from interested parties.
In March, the DLF convened a meeting that brought together Task Group members and representatives of library system vendors and developers, and produced the "Berkeley Accord", an agreement about the most essential and feasible interfaces to include in an initial set of interfaces. This set of interfaces, called the "Basic Discovery Interfaces", is described in detail in the new ILS-DI recommendation. The recommendation also describes and recommends a variety of other functions to support higher levels of interoperability.
Simon Fraser University Library's Linux-based reSearcher, which is widely used in Canada, is an open source software suite that includes:
The Digital Library Federation's ILS and Discovery Systems working group has issued a Draft Recommendation investigating issues related to integrated library system and discovery system integration.
Here's an excerpt from the "Introduction":
This document is the (DRAFT) report of that group. It gives technical recommendations for integrating the ILS with external discovery applications. This report includes
- A summary of a survey of the needs and discovery applications implemented and desired by libraries in DLF (and other similar libraries).
- A high-level summary of specific abstract functions that discovery applications need to be able to invoke on ILS's and/or their data to support desired discovery applications, as well as outgoing services from ILS software to other applications.
- Recommendations for concrete bindings for these functions (i.e. specific protocols, APIs, data standards, etc.) that can be used with future and/or existing ILS's. Producing a complete concrete binding and reference implementation is beyond the scope of this small, short-term group; but we hope to provide sufficient requirements and details that others can produce appropriate bindings and implementations.
- Practical recommendations to encourage libraries, ILS developers, and discovery application developers to expeditiously integrate discovery systems with the ILS and other sources of bibliographic metadata.
Statsbiblioteket is developing Summa, a federated search system.
Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard, Director of Development, discusses Summa and other topics in a new podcast (CNI Podcast: An Interview with Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard, Director of Development at the State and University Library, Denmark).
Here's an excerpt from the podcast abstract:
Summa is an open source system implementing modular, service-based architecture. It is based on the fundamental idea "free the content from the proprietary library systems," where the discovery layer is separated from the business layer. In doing so, any Internet technology can be used without the limitations traditionally set by proprietary library systems, and there is the flexibility to integrate or to be integrated into other systems. A first version of a Fedora—Summa integration has been developed.
A white paper is available that examines the system in more detail.
Two mailing lists have been recently established: JISC-SHIBBOLETH-LIBRARIES and sword-app-tech.
Excerpt from the JISC-SHIBBOLETH announcement:
Many institutions are now at the stage with their implementation of federated access management where issues directly impacting libraries are being considered and managed. This includes discovery processes for end-users, testing and changing access to federated service providers, dealing with different user definitions, managing license and resource information and changing send-user information.
To help support this process we have established a separate mailing list to enable discussion and exchange of views directly relating to library issues.
Excerpt from the Fedora-commons-users announcement:
A new mailing list has been created for discussion, bug reports, implementations questions and development ideas relating to SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit).
SWORD is a protocol for interoperable deposit between repository platforms. It was developed by a JISC project during 2007, building on earlier work to define a deposit protocol, and is based on the Atom Publishing Protocol.
The Oregon State University Libraries have released LibraryFind 0.8.2.
Here’s an excerpt from the CODE4LIB announcement:
LibraryFind is metasearch software written in Ruby-on-Rails. It allows libraries to provide a unified search solution to their users, letting library users search across both licensed collections and local collections. LibraryFind is open source software (licensed under the GPL), and is free to download and use. More information on LibraryFind can be found at http://libraryfind.org.
The Z39.50 Target Directory from Index Data includes both Z39.50– and SRU/SRW-enabled systems.
It can be searched or browsed by name.
Villanova University's Falvey Memorial Library has released VuFind 0.5 Beta. This open-source software operates in conjunction with Voyager OPACs (more drivers being developed), and it is powered by Solr.
Here's an excerpt from the project's home page:
VuFind is a library resource portal designed and developed for libraries by libraries. The goal of VuFind is to enable your users to search and browse through all of your library's resources by replacing the traditional OPAC to include:
- Catalog Records
- Digital Library Items
- Institutional Repository
- Institutional Bibliography
- Other Library Collections and Resources
VuFind is completely modular so you can implement just the basic system, or all of components. And since it's open source, you can modify the modules to best fit your need or you can add new modules to extend your resource offerings.
Index Data has released Version 1.0.1 of Pazpar2, an open source Z39.50 client.
Here’s an excerpt from the press release:
Pazpar2 . . . can be viewed either as a high-performance metasearching middleware or a Z39.50 client with a webservice interface, depending on your perspective and needs. It is a fairly compact C program—a resident daemon—that incorporates the best we know how to do in terms of providing high performance, user-oriented federated searching. . . .
One cool thing it does is search many databases in parallel, and do it fast, without unduly loading up the user interface. . . It retrieves a set of records from each target, and performs merging, deduplication, ranking/sorting, and pulls browse facets from them. . . .
It doesn’t know anything about data models, so you can handle exotic data sources if you need to. . . you use XSLT to normalize data into an internal model—we provide examples for MARC21 and a DC-esque internal model, and configure ranking, facets, sorting, etc., from that. . . .
