1. VuFind in the CARLI Environment LITA National Forum 2009 E. Paige Weston, Library Systems Coordinator

2. About CARLI Consortium of Academic & Research Libraries in Illinois 76 of 153 member libraries share a centrally- managed Voyager system called I-Share. 26.5M bib records, undedup’d 369K resource-sharing transactions in FY09 13 of 76 I-Share libraries were VuFind “early adopters.” 6 I-Share libraries currently consider VuFind their primary OPAC interface.

3. Why Did CARLI Try VuFind? In spring 2008 we were still on Voyager 6.5.3. WebVoyage looked old-fashioned. WebVoyage was hard to customize. WebVoyage 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, MARC4J, etc. We wanted experience exporting, indexing, and synchronizing our enormous bibliographic dataset, in anticipation of the XC project.

4. We Consider VuFind “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).

5. What CARLI Did with VuFind Rethought the whole “union catalog” concept Decided not to replicate the I-Share Universal Catalog in the VuFind environment Exported Voyager bibs and indexed them in Solr Developed a procedure for sync’ing data, based on existing UC update procedures Created library-specific “views” of VuFind Addressed the Voyager opacsrvr in order to support both Voyager Call Slip and Universal Borrowing requests Established VuFind as a “smart” SFX Source

6. How We Decided What To Work On Didn’t want our VuFind 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 VuFind version 1.0 Since then, we’ve made minor adjustments to the user interface, and to local data indexing, but no big structural changes.

7. VuFind’s Future at CARLI At this point, CARLI is unlikely ever to upgrade to VuFind 1.0. Because WebVoyage 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 VuFind. VuFind 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?