[Web4lib] Open Source OPAC - VUFind Beta Released

[Andrew Nagy]

Sorry for the cross-posting

Hello All,

I am pleased to announce the release of our Next-Gen library catalog browser, VuFind.  It is now officially open source code under the GPL and hosted on Sourceforge.  We have been working on the application for quite some time now, almost a year, and for the past few months have been working with some local schools to test the application and begin to build some install scripts.

Currently out of the box the software works with the Voyager catalog, but we are working on adding additional drivers to work with your favorite ILS!  Even Evergreen and Koha!  (If you would like to volunteer to build an ILS Driver, we would highly appreciate the contribution.)

Some of you may recall my presentation at Code4Lib 2007 on our initial efforts of the software using a Native XML Database.  Now using the power of Apache Solr, the speeds are astonishing and as we all know, Apache Solr really does rock!

Please have a look at our project website to download the software and you can even try out a live demo of the software:
http://www.vufind.org/

We are currently in a beta stage of development with the software but hope to have all necessary functionality completed by the end of the summer and have a stable production release by the Fall semester.  Please feel free to sign up for the mailing list to let us know any thoughts you have on the project and please report any bugs you encounter in testing, etc.

Enjoy!
Andrew