A few days ago I mentioned the VuFind project and since then time I’ve been trying to find the time to get an installation running locally. After switching from SuSE to Ubuntu (and after getting more than a couple of really timely bits of information from Wayne Graham down at William and Mary) I now have at least a portion of the VuFind software working:
This little sample installation (running on a 1.8Ghz Athlon-based Shuttle with just 512Mb memory) is built with about 231,000 78,000 35,000+ bib records from our Voyager system (items added or modified between January 1, 2004 and the present). What’s not yet working is the link back to Voyager to get rid of those little “loading…” messages and replace them with holdings and circulation information. Also clearly there are a few XML and XSL issues which prevent full-record display of an individual item [fixed that].
But the part that is working is pretty cool—like the faceted search options built along the right side of the page.
Will tackle the Voyager link-back piece next—unfortunately, I’m having just a bit of trouble getting the PHP/Oracle software installed (PDO_OCI). Would go much faster if I actually knew what I was doing but happily iterative hacking through trial and error does work—it just takes longer.