VuFind Developers Call Minutes: May 1, 2012

Attending: Filipe Bento, Demian Katz, Benjamin Mosior, Al Rykhus, Ernie Simuro, Kate Wolkwitz

• VUFIND-150 - Demian has closed this ticket (requesting better web-based configuration) since VuFind 2.0 offers automatic web-based configuration of key VuFind settings, and a comprehensive config editor seems unlikely in the foreseeable future.
• VUFIND-151 - Since the scope of the Admin module is being reduced for VuFind 2.0, Demian has closed this ticket (requesting a Solr elevated terms editor in the web interface). Implementing this would likely be scope-creep in the wrong direction.
• VUFIND-154 - This outage-handling ticket has been closed as VUFIND-528 covers much of its functionality and other changes in VuFind 2.0 render it otherwise obsolete.
• VUFIND-180 - An updated/expanded “limit by library” patch has been posted here; see also comment on VUFIND-458.
• VUFIND-192 - The Summon module in VuFind 2.0 now has adequate (if not flawless) citation support.
• VUFIND-246 - This CSS-related ticket has been rendered obsolete by VuFind 2.0 and the blueprint theme, so it has been closed.
• VUFIND-481 / VUFIND-482 / VUFIND-483 - These improvements to Shibboleth authentication have been committed.
• VUFIND-528 - Luke's “No ILS” driver has been updated and committed.
• VUFIND-561 - This ticket has been opened to track progress on implementing inter-library borrowing as part of the ILS driver design.
• VUFIND-562 - Certain characters can cause problems in facet strings; this ticket reports the problem. Demian will investigate when time allows.
• VUFIND-563 - This ticket proposes using the HTML5 <mark> tag for highlighting; that change will be deferred until we have an HTML5 theme.
• VUFIND-564 - This ticket provides a workaround for slow Voyager driver performance related to renewal checking; it has been committed.
• VUFIND-565 - This ticket makes the SMS phone number input more forgiving; it has been committed.
• VUFIND-566 - This patch adds optional support for using Twilio to send text messages instead of the built-in mailer.
• VUFIND-567 - This patch makes favicons easier to configure on a theme-by-theme basis in VuFind 2. Demian has committed it.
• VUFIND-568 - This is a support question about relevance ranking; Demian has posted an answer and closed the ticket.
• VUFIND-569 - This is a support question about sorting; Demian has posted an answer and closed the ticket.

Demian has finished porting over existing authentication options (though a couple of new options in JIRA should eventually be addressed) and has implemented article citation support (to help improve citations within the Summon module). He has also created an Admin module for VuFind 2.0 featuring a subset of functionality from 1.x and improved security features (access can be restricted by IP address and/or VuFind username – better than the old .htpasswd approach). Since the previous Admin module is not very heavily used, it did not seem important to port all functionality to 2.0 – especially features that could serve as security holes – but it is useful to have an administration area of some sort for reports and basic maintenance tasks.

Chris has begun redesigning the statistics gathering functions of VuFind. Once stats are gathered successfully, he will implement reporting in the new Admin area.

No news from Demian, apart from minimal adjustments for compatibility with the new NoILS driver. Al has done some work to expand this for his installation and will share patches.

Nothing new since the last call.

A few more bugs have been fixed. Demian hasn't taken a look since the last call – he will focus on this after finishing up final touches on VuFind 2 (which may still be a few more weeks of work).

Benjamin plans to share a proposal regarding consortial functionality in time for the next call.

Filipe brought up the growing area of open data – for example, Harvard's recent release of catalog data, and the harvestable pubmed index. Demian will create a wiki page (Open Data Sources) to track this and encourage sharing of free data. There was also discussion of having a central index of this data that could either be added to search results via sharding and/or used as a replication source for local clones. This would require significant infrastructure work, but it would be a useful tool for the VuFind community – perhaps a topic for deeper discussion at the Summit in October.

Kate and Demian discussed some of the finer points of SVN vendor branching.

Filipe also asked about deduplication, a task which may be aided by Ere Maijala's record manager tool, which adds an extra layer of pre-import processing to create keys that can be used to group records in search results, achieving a form of deduplication.

The next call will be Tuesday, May 15, 2012 at 10am Eastern Daylight Time (14:00 GMT).