In my never ending effort to fill all of my waking (and some sleeping) hours with new and exciting projects, I decided to try installing vufind so we could evaluate it against our catalog.  Roy Tennant describes it in a Library Journal article:

http://www.libraryjournal.com/blog/1090000309/post/1050012105.html

I have an instance running at:

http://digilib.bu.edu/vufind/

I did very little customization to the home screen, just a slightly modified logo and added a few links to other search options. I loaded all of the bib records from Millennium (as of two days ago) that are not suppressed (@1.3 million). The call number, location and circ status are harvested in real time. You will note that this seems to work for some, but others simply say loading.  The book cover images, reviews, and comments are being loaded from Amazon.  A search of “bioethics” shows several records with book cover images and reviews from Amazon. It would be possible, however, to add info from Google, Syndetics, etc.

A few days ago I harvested OAI records describing the University of Toronoto digitized collection from the Internet Archive.  At some point in the near future I’ll convert them to MARC and load them in as well.

This is vufind version 0.82.   Obviously it is still in development, though Villanova and a few other libraries have gone live with it:

http://library.villanova.edu/Find

http://www.vufind.org/

I’ve still been playing with Scriblio, the WordPress Blog plugin being developed by Casey Bisson up at Plymouth State in New Hampshire. It seems slow in comparison to Scriblio, particularly with a large collection.  I may continue to work with it on small collections, but it has a way to go before I would put it in production for the entire BU catalog. You can see it at:

http://digilib.bu.edu/cat

I’ve been thinking more about the importance of conversations in the library. For a number of years I’ve talked about our collection embodying a conversation that spans centuries and continents, but it’s been harder to think about how to facilitate an ongoing conversation with our current library users. Certainly we do so by way of reference transactions but those seem fewer than I would like.

One of the pedagogical premises behind the direction we are headed in the Theology Library is that “knowledge is created through conversation.” We are trying to find ways to facilitate an ongoing conversation among our library users. I’ve been interested in how we might imagine the online catalog facilitating conversation. A couple months ago I embedded a Scriblio interface to a small collection of digital objects into the History of Missiology Web site. The idea is that we can allow users to comment on the texts. I decided to give it a try on a little larger basis. I’ve begun loading records from our online catalog into another instance of scriblio. This may be a way of providing a forum for conversation…

http://comm745-server.bu.edu/alt_cat/