Looking at the list of 2.0 tools, the one that most interested me (that we had not already covered) was VuFind at vufind.org.
What a great premise and online catalog application that my patrons can use to see what books I have on hand. Best of all it is open source, which makes it within my budget and the user can modify the origianl application based on thier own needs. So I take a look at it and am really disappointed. I searched by author for Brooks, Terry. He is a fantasy author who has tons of books most of which center around Shannara.
In this list I see verything but Mr. Brooks which makes me question the applicability of the information found in searches. I don't really think that I would have fun with something that was this out of whack for any search. Further searching by "terry brooks" or "brooks, terry" found no books.
But perhaps they just don't have many books listed on the online demo application. There were links to the libraries that are using this application for their cataloging. I checked out king, stephen on the Colorado State University website and got a list of his books right away:
http://discovery.library.colostate.edu/Search/Home?lookfor=king%2C+stephen&type=author&submit=Search
It is a nice looking application. I begin to look at time consumption. Many open source programs are prone to bugs and I simply do not have programming skills to overcome other programmer's bugs.
I was really impressed to see that they offer support at sourceforge.net. Many applications do not offer support especially for open source apps. This is a programmer who will help end users work out bugs for the programs that they have written and are giving away freely. most people don't have the time for this as they have other things to do, like work. But since this application was developed at a college I can only assume thatt here is a steady stream of programming majors who tweak this application and correct any issues as they come up.
It does look like they have a lot of bugs currently. Until they get most of these corrected I will probably steer clear. But soon enough this looks like a very promising application.
VuFind: Social Features from Falvey Memorial Library on Vimeo.
No comments:
Post a Comment