Directors Report: Discovery Tool Coming Soon

MnPALS Plus: a Brief History of an Open Source Discovery Tool

• One of the outcomes of the Consortium of MnPALS Libraries Strategic Plan (Dec 2006) was the recognition that a better end-user interface to the Aleph system was needed, one with the modern features users have come to expect on the Web. Features such as:
  • a simple Google-like user interface
  • spell checking, "did you mean?"
  • relevance ranked results
  • faceted seaching
  • "more like this"
  • social networking (Web 2.0) features like tagging, reviewing, etc.
• These new interfaces are often called "Discovery Tools" and typically harvest the bibliographic data from the ILS, and reformat it to optimize performance and implement advanced features.
• Last summer, Al Rykhus at the PALS Office implemented a prototype “discovery tool” based on an Open Source application called fac-back-opac (but usually referred to as "Al's Discovery Tool"), which ran on SOLR and Lucene. It was demonstrated at the Fall 2007 User Group meeting, as well as at the Executive Committee and User Council meetings. Reactions were favorable.
• Later we became convinced that another open source product, VUFind from Villanova University, offered a better architecture, a larger development community and a richer feature set. We therefore adopted this as our development platform. Luckily, VUFind also runs in a SOLR / Lucene environment, so the experience gained from working with fac-bac-opac was still useful.
• We are calling our version of VUFind MnPALS Plus and we plan to have a stable implementation up by August 15th.
• The PALS Office has been working with the Discovery Tool Task Force to refine the design and implementation parameters. They are helping us debug the product as well. In addition, the Discovery Tool Task Force is planning to conduct some usability testing early this fall.
• Any MnPALS libraries wishing to use MnPALS Plus may do so, either as a replacement for, or as a supplement to, the Aleph OPAC.
• MnPALS Plus can currently be found at http://vufind.mnpals.net.