Villanova, Pennsylvania – June 24, 2024 – Version 10.0 of the VuFind® Open Source discovery software has just been released. This major release has a strong focus on modernization and forward compatibility, significantly modernizing the project’s user interface and back-end database code. However, it offers more than “under the hood” improvements, as it also adds some significant new features, fixes several bugs, and makes improvements to translations, compatibility and accessibility.
Some key additions and changes:
– New beta “bootstrap5” and “sandal5” themes have been added to upgrade the user interface to an up-to-date version of the Bootstrap framework. These themes will become the defaults in the next major release (11.0); the current Bootstrap 3-based themes will be deprecated in the next minor release (10.1).
– The performance and accessibility of the search result interface has been significantly improved by using modern Javascript techniques for data loading.
– Persistent logins (“remember me” functionality) are now supported (but are disabled by default).
– Configurable rate limiting support is now built in to protect against unreasonable traffic loads.
– On-screen virtual keyboards are now available (but disabled by default).
– Search result relevancy ranking calculations can be displayed in the user interface (to answer user queries about result ordering and to aid in adjusting behavior) by enabling the new “Explain” feature.
– Language names from metadata are now localized (e.g. “English” displays as “Anglais” when the user interface is set to French).
– Partial Māori language support has been added to the user interface.
Questions about the new release or VuFind® in general can be directed to Demian Katz, the chair of the VuFind® Project Management Committee and the Director of Library Technology at Villanova University. The software and its documentation may be found at https://vufind.org.
Contact:
Demian Katz
demian.katz@villanova.edu
Villanova University
Falvey Library
800 Lancaster Avenue
Villanova, PA 19085
###