Vufind: Binding Koha and DSpace together

I usually deploy Koha for Library Management System and DSpace for Digital Repositories. The big question usually is how to search both systems at once (federated search) from a single interface. I have read about different solutions, including Blacklight, dbwiz and Vufind

Recently, I took a look at Vufind, and installed it on Debian Squeeze. To install Vufind, I followed the documentation here. I configured Vufind to index Koha and DSpace following the very good documentation efforts by the folks at Brac University (pdf).

I had 2 major issues during the configuration and testing. The first was that I could not view the details page for records imported into Vufind from DSpace. I joined and posted the issue on the mailing list of Vufind and I received pointers towards the solution. The problem happened to come from my installation of DSpace rather than Vufind.

The second issue was that description of items was not showing up in the Vufind details page. I posted this on the mailing list again and Demian Katz, one of the lead developers, responded that it was a bug and that he will do a patch before the week ends. To my surprise a few hours later, I got a mail saying the issue has been patched. I applied the patch and hey presto, my descriptions appeared in the right places.

This kind of support in the Vufind community reminds me of the kind of Support on the Koha community, and has encouraged me to keep on poking at Vufind to discover its hidden treasures.

So far I have been able to get records from my DSpace, Koha and the Project Gutenberg into my Vufind installation. What I am working on now it to use aperture for full text indexing of pdf documents through Vufind.

And this is a big thank you to the Koha, Vufind, DSpace and the open source community at large for the wonderful work being done to bring great tools to everyone.

Keep a date with me on this Blog to learn about my adventures with Vufind.

Open Source rocks!