Vu Find in the CARLI Environment LITA National
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Vu. Find in the CARLI Environment LITA National Forum 2009 E. Paige Weston, Library Systems Coordinator
About CARLI • • Consortium of Academic & Research Libraries in Illinois 76 of 153 member libraries share a centrallymanaged Voyager system called I-Share. • • 26. 5 M bib records, undedup’d 369 K resource-sharing transactions in FY 09 13 of 76 I-Share libraries were Vu. Find “early adopters. ” 6 I-Share libraries currently consider Vu. Find their primary OPAC interface.
Why Did CARLI Try Vu. Find? • In spring 2008 we were still on Voyager 6. 5. 3. • • • Web. Voyage looked old-fashioned. Web. Voyage was hard to customize. Web. Voyage was inaccessible to the blind. We had an able and eager programmer on staff. We wanted to stick our toe into the Open Source pool, become familiar with Solr, MARC 4 J, etc. We wanted experience exporting, indexing, and synchronizing our enormous bibliographic dataset, in anticipation of the XC project.
We Consider Vu. Find “Experimental” • By "experimental" we have meant: • • that we would be flexible, inventive, or opportunistic in our development work; that the interface would change rapidly and iteratively; that the project would be formally structured or "controlled, " and a place to test hypotheses about what users want or what is "intuitive"; that the interface was temporary, something on which we would not put down our weight (but we stopped meaning this pretty quickly).
What CARLI Did with Vu. Find • Rethought the whole “union catalog” concept • • Exported Voyager bibs and indexed them in Solr • • Decided not to replicate the I-Share Universal Catalog in the Vu. Find environment Developed a procedure for sync’ing data, based on existing UC update procedures Created library-specific “views” of Vu. Find Addressed the Voyager opacsrvr in order to support both Voyager Call Slip and Universal Borrowing requests Established Vu. Find as a “smart” SFX Source
How We Decided What To Work On • • • Didn’t want our Vu. Find to diverge too far from everyone else’s Concentrated our development on issues related to our size, or our consortial resource-sharing requirements Froze significant development work in late fall 2008, in anticipation of Vu. Find version 1. 0 • Since then, we’ve made minor adjustments to the user interface, and to local data indexing, but no big structural changes.
Vu. Find’s Future at CARLI • • • At this point, CARLI is unlikely ever to upgrade to Vu. Find 1. 0. Because Web. Voyage version 7 performance was disappointing and because the XC is not yet ready for use, CARLI staff are re-evaluating the decision not to continue development on our current, “CARLIfied” version of Vu. Find enhancement projects to pursue will be chosen with the XC in mind: what will be, if not transferable to, at least informative about the XC development project?