Mobius Conference - VuFind at Truman Next-generation Open-source Blues

This session is about using an open-source next-generation catalog. Presenter is Stephen Wynn, Head of Technical Services and Systems at Pickler Memorial Library, Truman State University.

Last-generation catalogs are unfriendly, have limited feature and are no longer cool.
Next-generation catalogs have visual organization of results, faceted searching, results from catalog and more, social software, tag clouds. Examples include Encore and Aquabrowser. Presenter is showing an example of Encore and it looks really cool. So much nicer than the regular (old-fashioned) library catalog.

Right Generation Interfaces
-are told that libraries are losing users to Google and Amazon, but are we really in competition with them?
-Cool is nice, but most of the time libraries are not cool.
-Libraries should be interested in useful features such as faceted searching, breadcrumbs and social features

Options for Open Source catalogs:
Blacklight, Fac-bac-opac, LibraryFind, Scriblio, VuFind

VuFind - pulls info out of the last generation catalog such as if a book is available, descriptions and holdings, with next-generation users can then tag or rate the item. This also has a "cite this" option for different style guides. Students love this feature!

Features of VuFind include faceted searching, social software, real-time data from catalog, customizable index, breadcrumbs, statistical information available through SOLR Admin Module, locally created fields may be addded to the index in any way you please, relevancy ranking is completley customizable, and links to book cover images, reviews and other vendor content.

VuFind Social Software - users can set-up an account, add tags, rate items, etc. Does not currently have visual organization (tag clouds)

Fuctions for placing holds and obtaining "My Library" information are not yet written.

This library ran into problems with the installation instructions, they had to write their own.

There is a large learning curve for this product, not just this product but all the others that have to be used to support this (i.e. MySQL, Linux, Apache, etc.)

Result: did not end up implementing because of problems such as placing holds, viewing checked-out items and fines, built-in security measures, and optimizing SOLR.

While it did not work for this library, other libraries out there are using this and other's like it.