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VuFind Up at Villanova
August 20, 2008

I've written before about next-generation catalog projects based on Solr (which itself is based on Lucene), and even specifically about VuFind (pronounced "view-find"). But now there are at least two production installations of it, one of which powers the National Library of Australia catalog, released at the end of May. In an article on the project, Stephen Lacey and Julie Whiting note:

Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with many comments praising the clean, simple search interface, the display of narrowing options to drill down and refine the search results, and the improvements in item requesting. Relevance ranking in particular has been vastly improved with the aid of real searches undertaken by our research users. Since using VuFind more than one researcher has indicated finding additional resources they never knew the Library held. They have become very enthusiastic about providing examples of difficult searches once it was realised that their comments were responded to and the results derived from these comments soon evident in improved VuFind performance.

Georgia Tech is also using it, although it isn't entirely clear how one gets to it from their homepage (the catalog link goes to a union catalog using a commercial system). Perhaps it isn't in full production yet (someone please comment below if it is).

But as of today, the Falvey Memorial Library at Villanova University, the birthplace of VuFind, has now replaced their public catalog with VuFind. Since they still need their commercial product (Voyager, from ExLibris) for other functions besides finding things (e.g., circulation, holds, etc.) they cannot drop it, but it is no longer the public face for their collections.

The interface is one of the cleanest out there, with a nice design that manages to put a lot of options on the screen without a sense of clutter. A couple test searches ("Nature" and "Shakespeare Hamlet") show that the relevance ranking is fairly decent and the ability to handle mixed author/title words is too. Cover art is displayed when available and facets of the search results are displayed in a sidebar to make it easy for users to narrow in on what they want. For my money, one of the nicest features is an immediate display in the summary results of the availability of an item (with "Available" in green, natch, and "Checked out" in red).

All in all I think this is a "next-gen" catalog system to watch, if not actively inspect. The fact that the National Library of Australia has it in production is certainly notable, not the least for demonstrating it can handle a sizeable load. I titled my earlier post "VuFind Rocks the House"; I could have titled this one "VuFind: Rock On!".

Posted by Roy Tennant on August 20, 2008 | Comments (2)