VuFind® Community Call Minutes: May 3, 2022

Attending: Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, Claas Kazzer, Andrii Lysohor, Ere Maijala, Mario Trojan, Lionel Walter

The April, 2022 Newsletter was discussed.

JIRA data will be migrated to the cloud tomorrow (Wednesday, May 3) around 10am Eastern. There will be a brief outage during the migration. Post-migration, if you do not already have an Atlassian account, you may need to reset your password to access your tickets. Initial testing indicates that the process works pretty smoothly.

No news.

No news. Next step is to review progress on the pull request, when time permits.

Blended search – the ability to create a single result list combining records from multiple backends – is now available in the dev-9.0 branch and will be a major new feature of VuFind 9.0. If you are interested in this capability, please test out the dev-9.0 branch and provide feedback. Blender documentation is available. Thanks to Ere Maijala and the team at the National Library of Finland for contributing this major new feature.

Recent user surveys have indicated a strong interest in improved use of authority data in VuFind, and several current VuFind users have built local enhancements around authorities. We should discuss whether some of this existing work can be generalized and shared to enhance the project and reduce local maintenance burdens.

Demian recommended reviewing Mario's IxTheo presentation for inspiration.

Questions and possible directions:

• Should we do more with the authority schema fields added by pull request #750 in 2016? They have never been used outside of facets.ini, and we don't have test records in our default continuous integration set to even demonstrate them.
• Should the authority schema be extended with any additional standard fields?
  • Mario has added some fields for external IDs (ORCID, VIAF, Wikidata, etc., etc.; see IxTheo's schema… note that ID fields are multi-valued due to real-world issues)
  • Demian opened VUFIND-1551 to track this issue.
• How should we display authority data? Do we need to integrate the RecordDataFormatter (or something like it)? Do we need some kind of plugin mechanism for dropping in related content?
  • Mario has used a template-based approach for record display, with some functionality in the view helper (for generating schema.org HTML). example code
  • Ere shared a Finna authority page example.
  • Lionel shared a SwissBib example showing integration of authority data.
  • Demian opened VUFIND-1553 to track this issue.
• Can we create something like IxTheo's Wikidata picture proxy to automatically (but flexibly/pluggably) load images on authority pages (or even search results)? The existing cover loader could be a model.
  • Mario suggested that we might want to better generalize the Cover Caching Proxy. He has built an abstract proxy controller to build upon. Demian will review this and provide feedback so that Mario can open a PR.
  • Demian opened VUFIND-1554 to track abstract proxy refactoring and VUFIND-1555 to track the need for an authority image loader.
• Can we create something like IxTheo's BEACON API mechanism to look up relationships (again, flexibly/pluggably)? Input = identifiers/headings, output = set of relationships.
  • Mario noted that the service he built was based on an API which went offline temporarily and caused problems when a cache was cleared – a more persistent cache might be valuable to work around this problem.
• If we build a content plugin mechanism, what kinds of plugins can we build? Lists of relationships? Word clouds/charts?
• How can we better incorporate authority data into searches? (e.g. balancing use of identifiers with textual headings)
  • Lionel suggested using variant names from authority records to enhance search results.
  • Ere is working on an approach that allows authority IDs to be used in parallel with records that don't have authority IDs. This allows very specific matching without excluding less rich records. There is also a decision point where users can decide how to interact with the heading – e.g. search as author, search as heading, find related information, etc.
• Do we need to include more standard configurations/tools (or simply create more documentation in the wiki) for loading existing authority records (e.g. GND)?
• Is there a better solution than indexing parallel values across multiple Solr fields for storing complex data like authors with roles/identifiers?
  • Mario hasn't found a better solution yet; the only technical alternative is using delimited/structured data, which has other drawbacks.
• Should we use more elegant URL routing for authority records (/Authority/xxx instead of /Authority?id=xxx)?
  • Demian opened VUFIND-1552 to track this item.

Demian is hoping to work with the PMC to set a release date for 8.1 in the near future. If you have outstanding work or feature requests for inclusion in 8.1, please let someone from the PMC know as soon as possible before things get locked in place.

Lionel had some questions about progress on single-page applications based on the VuFind API. Demian is not aware of further work being done in this area. He noted that the existing VuFind API should be able to support a fairly robust search-oriented SPA, but significant additional work is needed to support additional features like user functionality (since authentication would need to be implemented).

The next call will be Tuesday, June 7, 2022 at 9am Eastern Daylight Time (13:00 GMT).