Yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Education had an article about library catalogs. One of the open source solutions mentioned in the article was VuFind, the program behind SIUCat Beta Search and behind I-Share's VuFind search.
The Virtual Library Group at Morris Library is looking at some of the other alternatives listed in the article. As the article mentions, the commercial options can cost tens of thousands of dollars each year. Customized open source software can be just as expensive because the programmers need to be paid. Morris Library has an added complication from I-Share. As part of our arrangement to get easy access to the books from other university libraries in Illinois, we all share a catalog. Almost any change that we make to SIUCat is constrained by this (otherwise awesome) arrangement. Nevertheless, the potential in some of these tools could make it a lot easier to find library materials.
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