Library Portal

In the Max Planck Society 34 libraries use the ILS Aleph (Ex Libris). Due to the increasing dissatisfaction with the Aleph Web OPAC and the prospect, that there won’t be any significant development to this search interface anymore, the Aleph-Team, the MPDL and the GWDG started to discuss the idea of an additional search interface, which should not only replace the Web-OPAC, but meet some further immediate needs.

The outcome of several meetings was a list of requirements, which were categorized in „nice“, „important“ and „essential“. Some of the 14 essential criterias were:


 * possibility of individual configurations for each institute
 * integrating additional resources, e.g. eBook catalog, institutional repositories, PubMan, …
 * full integration of availbility and circulation functionalities (user account, request, renewal etc.)

Complete list of requirements

Subsequently some open source and proprietary Next Generation Catalogs were examined with regard to the list. A closer look was spent on:


 * http://alephwiki.gwdg.de/index.php/WebOPAC_der_Zukunft_Primo Primo (Ex Libris)
 * http://alephwiki.gwdg.de/index.php/WebOPAC_der_Zukunft_Aquabrowser Aquabrowser (Serials Solutions)
 * http://alephwiki.gwdg.de/index.php/WebOPAC_der_Zukunft_Endeca Endeca (Endeca Technologies)
 * http://alephwiki.gwdg.de/index.php/WebOPAC_der_Zukunft_OpenBib OpenBib (open source)
 * http://alephwiki.gwdg.de/index.php/WebOPAC_der_Zukunft_VuFind VuFind (open source)

To gain initial experience with implementation and customization of a discovery and delivery tool a first test with the open source product VuFind was arranged. The data of two libraries and a part of the MPS-eBook-collection was loaded into the database.

In August 2011 five Libraries decided to start a pilot with vufind. The project ist supported and coordinated by the MPDL. Hosting and Support of VuFind is a service, provided by the VZG (Verbundzentrale Göttingen).

Most of the pilot Libraries will integrate the following data packages in their environment:
 * library catalog data
 * enrichment materials (tables of content etc.)
 * MPG E-Books-Catalog data
 * EZB / ZDB record
 * MPG repository (PubMan) data

''N.B. Most of the links in this article lead to the Aleph Wiki to which access is restricted to members of MPS and GWDG. We apologize for any inconvenience.''

Tags: Bibliotheksportal, WebOPAC der Zukunft, discovery and delivery layer