This year is VuFind®'s first formal membership drive – read on to learn more about the need for member support and what you can help the project to achieve!

The VuFind® discovery project has been a long-term success story in open source development. When it was first introduced as a prototype in 2007, the software rapidly attracted a dedicated international community that helped it to develop and improve. More than fifteen years later, the software continues to grow and evolve under the stewardship of a team of volunteers, with significant new features and integrations added every year.

While the VuFind® team is proud of all that it has accomplished so far, and it remains dedicated to continuing its efforts into the future, it also acknowledges that a purely voluntary development model has some challenges and limitations. Volunteers have competing priorities and cannot always be relied upon to complete work to specific schedules. Succession and contingency planning can be challenging when certain volunteers hold large amounts of knowledge or responsibility, but no resources have been allocated to replace them in case of emergency. Certain kinds of specialized technical knowledge may not be readily available within the volunteer pool at any given time.

With an awareness of these challenges, the community has been taking active steps to ensure VuFind®’s successful future. We have developed tutorial videos and an introductory textbook to make onboarding into the community easier. We have formed a Project Management Committee to provide a more formal structure for the project’s governance and to provide a mechanism for succession planning and responsiveness to unforeseen circumstances. We have joined the Open Library Foundation so that the project exists as an independent non-profit organization, not tied to the budgets or priorities of any single institution. However, there is still more that we can and should do.

The VuFind® community has accomplished amazing things with no dedicated budget and a devoted team of volunteer developers. However, we can accomplish even more if we begin to pool financial resources to increase the project’s capacity and further cement its future sustainability. The Project Management Committee has already begun gathering funding through our Registered Service Provider program, which several generous VuFind® partners have already joined. The next step is to ask for further funding from the broader community, either through a one-time donation or a recurring membership. Whether you are an individual user wishing to contribute a small amount as a simple “thank you” or the representative of an organization hoping to gain value from unspent funds at the end of your fiscal year, all donations are appreciated and will help to advance the project’s cause. If everyone who has benefit from using VuFind® contributes even a modest amount to the project, we have the potential to fund some exciting new initiatives.

A pool of project funds would enable consultations by outside experts to ensure continued excellence in areas of great interest to the broader community, such as security and accessibility. It could also open the door to bug bounties, CFP’s for feature development, or even the hiring of dedicated project staff. The more we can raise, the greater the possibilities. The project has exciting plans for the future, and the more rapidly we can increase our development capacity, the more quickly we can make these plans a reality.

Some possibilities for future work include accelerated modernization of VuFind®’s user interface, development of a more formal software manual, integration with new search platforms (such as the new WorldCat search API), expanded interoperability (through implementation of protocols such as SRU), investigation of shared services for the community (such as a shared index of open access publications), development of better tools to simplify VuFind® administration, planning for future training events, and more. Without funding, the community’s first priority must be on the routine maintenance necessary to keep the software stable, secure and relevant as technology evolves, a process which can take up a significant percentage of current resources before new features can even be considered. With your support, and the increased capacity it enables, we can make some of these other visions a reality much sooner.

Please visit our Membership Levels and Benefits page for more information on how you can contribute, and what a membership can do for you. Thank you for your consideration!