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configuration:course_reserves

Course Reserves

Academic libraries often need to list resources held on reserve for particular courses, departments and instructors. VuFind® supports this need in multiple ways.

Regardless of how reserves are configured, they can be accessed through the “/Search/Reserves” action beneath your base VuFind® URL.

Driver-Based Reserves (Default)

If your ILS driver implements the findReserves() method, VuFind® can load course reserves information in real-time from the ILS.

Solr-Based Reserves

You can configure the software to use a Solr index for course reserves searching instead of the ILS driver. This offers greater flexibility and a more attractive user interface, but it requires you to periodically reindex your data to keep the system up to date. To configure:

1.) Edit the [Reserves] section of config.ini and set search_enabled to true.

2.) Load data into the index by running the util/index_reserves.php tool to extract it from your ILS. ILS extraction requires support in the ILS driver. You can also load data from a CSV file. See index_reserves.php parameters below for details.

index_reserves.php command-line parameters

You can load data into your Solr reserves index by running the util/index_reserves.php command. Usage details:

Course reserves index builder

If run with no options, this will attempt to load data from your ILS.

Switches may be used to index from delimited files instead:

 -f [filename] loads a file (may be repeated for multiple files)
 -d [delimiter] specifies a delimiter (comma is default)
 -t [template] provides a template showing where important values
     can be found within the file.  The template is a comma-
     separated list of values.  Choose from:
          BIB_ID     - bibliographic ID
          COURSE     - course name
          DEPARTMENT - department name
          INSTRUCTOR - instructor name
          SKIP       - ignore data in this position
     Default template is BIB_ID,COURSE,INSTRUCTOR,DEPARTMENT
 -h or -? display this help information.

Multiple reserve Solr cores

Starting with VuFind® 9.0, if your Solr installation has more than one core for reserves (for instance, your Solr service is used by more than one VuFind® installation), you can change the name of the reserves core by customizing the [Index] section of reserves.ini. For earlier versions of VuFind®, customizing the core name required you to override the factory of the SolrReserves search backend.

configuration/course_reserves.txt · Last modified: 2023/11/09 18:47 by demiankatz