Seek and Vu [Shall] Find: Implementing, Evaluating, and Improving an Open Source Catalog Overlay

Sarah E. Johnston, St. Olaf College
Kathy Blough, St. Olaf College
Kasia Gonnerman, St. Olaf College
Hsianghui Liu-Spencer, Carleton College
Matt Ryan, Carleton College
Ann Zawistoski, Carleton College

Description

Last year, the Bridge Consortium (Carleton College & St. Olaf College libraries) found itself at a crossroads. Not yet ready to move to either a new ILS or a web scale discovery tool, yet needing to update our public catalog interface, we decided to implement VuFind, an open source catalog overlay originally developed at Villanova University. [(For more on the process that led to the decision to implement VuFind, please attend the session immediately preceding this one, “Discovering (and Redefining) Web Scale Discovery: One Consortium’s Experience.”) Conference planners, please see note.] Moving quickly, we implemented VuFind as the overlay for our current III system over the summer of 2011 and were live when students returned in September. This presentation will discuss the initial implementation process, our work to improve the interface based on user feedback, and potential future work as the consortium moves to new models of resource discovery. We will discuss the features of VuFind we found attractive, the pros and cons of working with an open source overlay, and our experience hosting VuFind at PALS, as well as our process for obtaining, analyzing, and applying users’ responses to the new overlay.

 

Seek and Vu [Shall] Find: Implementing, Evaluating, and Improving an Open Source Catalog Overlay

Last year, the Bridge Consortium (Carleton College & St. Olaf College libraries) found itself at a crossroads. Not yet ready to move to either a new ILS or a web scale discovery tool, yet needing to update our public catalog interface, we decided to implement VuFind, an open source catalog overlay originally developed at Villanova University. [(For more on the process that led to the decision to implement VuFind, please attend the session immediately preceding this one, “Discovering (and Redefining) Web Scale Discovery: One Consortium’s Experience.”) Conference planners, please see note.] Moving quickly, we implemented VuFind as the overlay for our current III system over the summer of 2011 and were live when students returned in September. This presentation will discuss the initial implementation process, our work to improve the interface based on user feedback, and potential future work as the consortium moves to new models of resource discovery. We will discuss the features of VuFind we found attractive, the pros and cons of working with an open source overlay, and our experience hosting VuFind at PALS, as well as our process for obtaining, analyzing, and applying users’ responses to the new overlay.