Considering the ILS Report

2008-03-26T15:13:00.002-05:00

The report Considering the ILS is a summary of the discussion shared between College of St. Benedict / St. John’s University (CSB/SJU), Concordia College, Gustavus Adolphus College, and Macalester College on March 10th.

Update on PALS investigation of discovery tools

2008-03-26T15:09:00.002-05:00

Keith Ewing from SCSU recently reported on the work PALS is doing to investigate discovery tools:

"For the past year MnPALS has had a task force investigating a “discovery tool” option; Melissa Prescott is a member of the task force. 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. Last summer Al Rykhus at the PALS Office implemented a prototype “discovery tool” based on an openSource application called Solr (using Lucene as a database). Al has done some work on improving Solr functionality, but nothing on the interface. The SCSU catalog can be searched by going to http://solr.mnpals.net/catalog/?inst=scs. The search interface is simple keyword; the results display is a vast improvement over the current MnPALS OPAC. However, despite widespread interest expressed in the look of the search results, Solr may not be adequate for the consortium, or even individual libraries within the consortium. We can use this interface as much as we want—Al is interested in feedback, assessment, and load testing.

Al is now working with VUFind, another openSource “discovery tool” developed by Villanova University (for a non-MnPALS demo, see http://vufind.org/demo/). VUFind offers better search options (beyond keyword) and results displays that mimic WorldCat.org. This was not demonstrated during the meeting. There are many additional enhancements beyond those provided by Solr, including opportunities for users to interact with the content in different ways (comments, favorites). There may be a beta MnPALS version of this demonstrated by Fall.

OCLC representatives made a presentation about WorldCat local, a customization of WorldCat.org to fulfill local library (or consortium) needs. The University of Washington pioneered this customization last year (see http://uwashington.worldcat.org/). This is a subscription service rather than a locally managed resource; there are limited customization options other than branding. MINITEX and OCLC are discussing WorldCat group as a possible replacement for the MnLINK Gateway ZPortal (also owned by OCLC). WorldCat has some advantages over Solr and VUFind, such as searching beyond the confines of the consortium, inclusion of articles (searches FirstSearch now; OCLC is negotiating with other database vendors to include their content through WorldCat, either through harvesting or federated searching, and present everything in a single result set). "

Koha: Main Users Guide for Version 2.2 (their current production version)

2008-03-20T10:33:00.002-05:00

http://www.kohadocs.org/usersguide/

2008-03-11T15:54:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the ILS Alternatives Blog! To get things started I thought I'd include links to some of the systems and products we discussed at the March 10th meeting as well as some articles we in the ILS Alternatives group at CSB/SJU have been reading.
Links

WorldCat Local: http://www.oclc.org/worldcatlocal/

Koha: http://www.koha.org/

LibLime: http://liblime.com/ (online demo: http://liblime.com/demos)

Evergreen: http://open-ils.org/

Articles we at CSB/SJU have been reading:

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue48/dempsey/

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/markey/01markey.html

http://infoservices.uwindsor.ca/dist/backgrounder.pdf

-Miranda
CSB/SJU