Trip Report: 4th VuFind Conference. Konstanz 6th-7th October 2015

The 4th meeting of German-speaking VuFind users / institutions using VuFind took place in Konstanz 6th to 7th October, 2015. The meeting was attended by Erik.

Summary: Meeting of developers & representatives from institutions providing end user solutions based on the VuFind framework. Most of them not only install & run VuFind but also (heavily) customize & tailor solutions to their specific needs. Many of the participants also maintain at least a local branch of VuFind on GitHub. The German-speaking community is preparing to collect ideas to influence the VuFind 3 development roadmap starting next week.

Conference Program: http://www.bsz-bw.de/bibliothekssysteme/vufind/2015.html (slides available)

Notes:

VuFind out of the box - general deficiencies
 * legal details disregarded (e.g. book covers)
 * standard fields not displayed
 * availability fails to cover all details
 * too many JavaScript, css files

Local VuFind development


 * be specific about base release
 * create local branch
 * extesions ought to work stand-alone
 * implement all changes within local modules
 * problem - releases, upgrades

Global development
 * requires dual maintenance
 * synchronize with current release
 * general maintenance, change requests, bug fixes
 * provide test cases

Merge all branches, resolve conflicts, local configuration in separate directory, push final version to git.

VuFind users may be required to provide & roll-out local instances quickly - example: BOSS

VuFind2 generally favoured, more logic moved to PHP classes, less complexity in templates.

Subject facetting by HeBIS
 * local mapping of different vocabularies
 * use placeholders to achieve transparency & completeness of facet

Article index created by UB Leipzig
 * low-cost successor to Primo Central solution
 * major data source: crossref
 * create intermediate format (quite standard...done by others as well)
 * framework in use to orchestrate steps of workflow
 * one-command index update
 * use of docker & manifold tools
 * frontend - foundation, Sass
 * https://finc.info
 * https://github.com/finc

Support of multiple data formats by UB Frankfurt, FID Darstellende Kunst
 * processing METS/MODS, LIDO, MARC21/MARCXML, non-standard (CSV, from Faust-DB, Allegro, etc)
 * unified format EDM/DM2E
 * fullrecord not indexed by used by single record driver
 * aggregate data by means of REPOX
 * solution planned to be open source
 * note: rather index 10-30K metadata records than parse by record driver

META by i.d.a-Dachverband
 * puts extremely high value on user experience before starting implementation
 * grouping of search results

Modularizing and interfaces - a critical view on VuFind 2
 * MVC is extremely heavy-weight
 * all services through MVC (even smaller ones like auto-suggest)
 * too many dependencies
 * global components required (vs. local modules), packages
 * upgrade - merge of complete branch with master required
 * share development (Villanova, Finc, BSZ, swissbib, ...)
 * VuFind 2.5 multiple (50) Zend repositories rather than single one
 * unified HTTP interface
 * upgrade VuFind 2 -> 3 - changes not required, but recommended

VuFind 3 development roadmap - etherpad will be set up & shared among participants, comments welcome

Follow-up: VuFind Summit 2015 (slides available)