I’ve created a screencast showing how easy it can be to install VuFind. Here I go from nothing (no server, no OS) to full VuFind install in under 8 minutes.

It would probably take less than two minutes (under 10mins in total) to add MARC records to the installation, but I didn’t have any to hand at the time.

This demo cheats a bit by using a script that does the heavy work, the script was a mash up I created taking existing scripts and commands that come with VuFind with a few tweaks. It probably would have been only slightly slow to run most commands manually.

The script in question is at http://www.nostuff.org/vufind-install.txt and of course anyone is free to download (and improve, please share changes). There’s lot of potential to improve it’s ability to work on different flavours of Linux.

Multi Instance

One of the key aspects of the script is that is allows you to easily install multiple instances of VuFind on to a server. By default VuFind installs in to /usr/local/vufind and has other things (databases, apache conf) names vufind. The script prompts for an ‘instance name’ and then uses that in place of ‘vufind’.

The rational for this is my feeling that VuFind is an excellent tool for creating niche catalogues that are a subset of the full Library collection (or as someone put it a ‘tranche of the catalogue’). A branch Library, particular collection, rare books, a particular School, Core reading (short loan books), specialist resources (AV / laptop items for loan) etc. The idea of a organisation’s records being in system, rather than many (of varying quality) makes sense, but it’s reasonable for those moving their records to a central system to want to be able to search their records independently of other records (and expecting users to go to an Advanced search of using a refine option of the main catalogue is not really not an option). VuFind seems like an obvious answer to this. Especially if new instances can be set up quickly.

In fact it seems to be a failing of most of the main Library Manage Systems (ILS) and their web interfaces that being able to create lots of interfaces (slicing and dicing the underlying single large pool of records). Most require a large amount of effort to create a second web interface to a catalogue. This seems like such an obvious flaw and a barrier to moving to one system to manage resources such as books and other items for an entire organisation.

Amazon EC2

Amazon AWS is a great tool to use for this. A small instance will cost around $0.10 an hour, the micro instance is even cheaper (just over $0.02). Create an instance for ten hours and you have spent around a dollar. Mess it up, just destroy it and create a new one. No risk and no hassle (for first time users the hardest thing is probably the ssh private keys).