1. Discovery strategies for Kuali OLE
Andrew Preater
Associate Director, Information Systems and Services
University of London
Kuali Days UK, 29 September 2013

2. Discovery potpourri LMS SHL website Discovery Digital content Archives
Current state of play with various siloed systems.
These boxes could be much more haphazard. The only real link is between LMS and Discovery right now.
We using Innovative Encore having implemented that for live use in 2010 on top of our WebPAC ‘classic catalog’.

3. Digital content & ePrints
Medium term
Discovery
BLMS
Digital content & ePrints
Archives
SHL website
Medium term solution. The important point is we’re not looking to implement perfection next year, we’re looking to do something better.
We want to search our local resources at minimum. We don’t have a resource discovery platform so that was an easier question.

4. OLE has no Catalog!
This fact was our initial driver – we knew we needed to work on discovery in the BLMS problem although OLE does not come with a catalog front-end.
This fact is a great shock to the system initially, but on reflection actually a great thing - OLE includes a strategic decision about not forcing us into a particular choice.
The point is we can all choose our own that meets local needs - we don’t even need to all use the same thing in a consortium like the BLMS.

5. Discovery work package
The lead on this was Tim Fletcher at Birkbeck, University of London.
We decide we would work collaboratively and pool knowledge to explore discovery options.
In the end we all wanted to set up and test VuFind for local use. Why VuFind?

6. Why VuFind? Exists now Right expertise
Highly flexible Open Source software
Why we decided on VuFind for our initial medium-term solution is that:
It exists right now so we could get on and use it
We have the right expertise locally to work with VuFind, comes down to a question of VuFind (PHP) versus Blacklight (Ruby) and our local PHP expertise is much better
It’s highly flexible open source software that we know we can customise and modify to meet our requirements

7. Research
So we can’t just implement something, we wanted to research our requirements and user needs to understanding our situation better.

8. Ethnography Working with Lizzie Atkinson (@library_lizzie) of UCL DIS
Working with Lizzie Atkinson at UCL DIS earlier in 2013 we used ethnographic methods to investigate library users use of the catalog in the library itself – how they use it and what they do.

9. 2. Staff focus groups
We ran staff focus groups over Summer 2013 to dig into what staff think of as requirements for a user-facing catalog front end.

10. Outcomes of staff focus groups very interesting - ‘We want the Moon on a stick’ is an actual quote!
Here’s a blog post summarizing this: groups/
‘The Moon on a Stick’, by Flickr user Simon Grieg. License CC-BY-NC-SA.

11. 3. Treat as a Web project!
Important point is the catalog front end is a website so we want to treat it as a web project rather than something odd from libraryland.
We’ll therefore be approach deploying VuFind using a standard approach to web usability / user experience.

12. VuFind find.senatehouselibrary.ac.uk
This will definitely deal with our local bib data, and for Senate House Libraries will have archives and ePrints included

13. Screenshot of Senate House Libraries, University of London test VuFind instance.
This is VuFind 2 running on a virtual machine. It’s straightforward to set up, it works, and it’s a great test-bed for decoupling discovery from the Millennium LMS backend.

14. BLMS Ufind
UFInd or Uber-VuFind is a codename for our project to create a shared VuFind instance that includes all of our MARC data.
Virtualised Amazon Web Server setup
All sites supply mrc files
Agreed standard for holdings output / site codes
1. Installed and setup VuFind on AWS
2. Import partner data
3. Allow for “by institution” filtering as a facet
4. Installed and setup VuFind on AWS
5. Import partner data
6. Allow for “by institution” filtering as a facet

16. Analysis using VuFind

17. Thank you
@preater