On 02/03/11 13:02, PHILLIPS M.E. wrote:

> I think at Royal Holloway Graham was hoping to have VuFind just
> searching Summon (into which their Aleph catalogue has been loaded).  Is
> the intention then to use VuFind's LMS drivers to provide the patron
> functions like placing hold requests without having to go into the Aleph
> catalogue?
> 

Yes. There are drivers in Vufind for most of the major LMS'es, and
though in varying stages of completeness they're not hard to build on.
The Aleph one just makes calls to the Aleph X-server, so anything
available from that can be handled in Vufind. That also includes Marc
lookups and holdings information. Like Summon itself, Vufind gets its
holdings data in real time from this route. I'm in the process of
incorporating as much of the patron management in Vufind as I can, as
well as pulling additional bibliographic data from Aleph. Some of this
is unfinished, and there are still some larger problems I haven't
thought through yet (ILL in particular). So the goal is for patrons not
to need to see the OPAC at all (though it is still there for anyone who
does want to use it), but that goal is still a little way off...

In addition, the current trunk version of vufind can already pull in
results from SFX or 360Link using their APIs. This is a little slow,
although cacheing the results helps. There is no very convenient
interface from SFX for the alphabetical journal title search, so we may
just have to reuse the SFX version inside an iframe or similar.

Losing Metalib, if we do, means we won't have any resource browser, so
I've added a few tables to Vufind and used the vufind browse code to
manage browsing resources by subject area etc. This part is a very
temporary bodge, as there is no proper management for the database
tables, but I hope it will tide us over while we sort out something more
permanent.

Graham