MnPALS Discovery Tool History

July 2008

VuFind Project

VUFind is a "discovery tool". Essentially, a “discovery tool” is a application or group of applications working together in a “presentation” layer between end users (students, faculty, public) and the integrated library system (ILS; in our case, Aleph). Most ILS’s have poor OPAC environments, so the idea is to create a better OPAC for users. A typical “discovery tool” extracts the bibliographic data from the ILS (usually daily is sufficient), reformats it to optimize performance, and stores it in its own database; the challenge comes with synchronizing availability information in real time.

VUFind URL: http://vufind.mnpals.net/index.php

SOLR Project

An alpha version of a Discovery Tool we worked on. Some of you might have seen a demonstration of the software at the 2007 Fall MnPALS User Group meeting. You can access this tool at:

http://solr.mnpals.net/

Or if you would like to bookmark your individual catalog you can use:

http://solr.mnpals.net/catalog/xxx

replacing xxx with the 3 letter ADM code from your Aleph ADM unit.

This tool is based on SOLR which is described as "an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library". If you would like more information on SOLR you can find it at:

http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

Reporting Bugs

As these are alpha releases, you can expect to find bugs, frequent changes, possible unexpected down times, strange bug report pages, etc. We would love to get your input on this tool. As such we have created a new board on the MnPALS Forum for questions, discussion, bug reports, enhancement suggestions, etc. This board is located at:

http://forums.mnpals.org/index.php?board=35.0

We plan on updating the databases at least daily Monday through Friday. For now this is a manual process, but we plan to automate the process in the near future.