Beta 2 brings up all of the enhancements we worked on over the summer, including those in the last update and a few more. The biggest one - and we've been waiting for this for a while - is the addition of social tagging and personalized accounts using your Yale netID.

As we move forward with the project, the things we'll concentrate on next are:

· improved spelling suggestions (based on Solr index rather than
standard dictionaries)

· search, retrieval, and display of records using non-western
languages and scripts

· Improved faceting of material types/formats and eventually,
locations

We’d also like to remind everyone that Yufind is now available through
the LibX Toolbar in Firefox and IE: http://libx.org/editions/download.php?edition=4B5E8B70.

As always, let us know if you have questions or comments at yufind.feedback@yale.edu.

After working most of the summer, the Yufind Team implemented the following improvements this week:

1. A new fail-over server, which helps make sure Yufind is there when you need it, whenever you need it.

2. Daily syncing with Orbis to make sure Yufind is up-to-date. Note that availability status is always current.

3. Improved response time: from several seconds to well under under one second to view a record.

4. Fuller, more readable record templates, especially for music, manuscript, and archival materials. For many of our special collections and rare materials, we've enhanced the display of important notes about unique Yale holdings. These will help you understand why an item might be important for your research.

5. Location and volume holdings are now provided even for titles lacking item records; temporary locations are displayed for items on reserve or otherwise shelved outside their 'home' repository.

Coming soon:

1. Index-based spelling suggestions
2. Display and retrieval of non-Roman languages and scripts
3. Improved faceting of material types/formats (e.g., "manuscripts" versus "unpublished materials")
4. Social tagging and personalized accounts

Here's a neat way to search Yufind: the "LibX" browser plug-in. You can also use it to search Orbis, the "A-to-Z list" of online journals and newspapers, and even Google and Google Scholar, all from the comfort of your web browser toolbar.

Download LibX Yale Edition for Firefox and/or Internet Explorer.

Today we updated 131,545 records in Yufind , bringing the underlying index into full alignment with Orbis. We're working on a nightly syncing routine which will virtually eliminate the time lag between the two databases. Circulation status in Yufind is always up-to-date, though, since it's generated dynamically from the latest raw circulation data.

We have resolved the configuration issue that causes the Narrow Search facets in the left column to load slowly. They are much faster now, though we are still tuning overall system performance.

Sorry for the slow down in facet loading speed. This is a temporary problem caused by our efforts to make them faster than they were by tweaking the Lucene Solr indexing engine. We hope to have this resolved in the next week.

We took the opportunity over break to make a significant upgrade to Yufind. You will notice much faster system response times and much more accurate faceting by subject, author, language, etc. You will also notice more options for redirecting searches from Yufind to other indexes and search engines. We hope to have our tagging and annotation tool in place within the next week. Hope you enjoy the improvements and we look forward to receiving your feedback.

(For those keeping track, this brings our production codebase to Vufind 1.0 Release Candidate 1. The other major change is a local adjustment to the secret-sauce query - we changed a key "OR" to an "AND" in order to create smaller result sets and improve facet relevance. If you're still reading this, you should consider becoming a librarian.)

A survey of Yufind beta users has shown that a majority of users like the new way to search, but some still prefer Orbis. We got lots of good suggestions on ways to improve Yufind and we're hard at work on implementing them.

Details and a link to the formal report are here:
http://labs.library.yale.edu/245/2008/11/yufind_results.html.

We have successfully upgraded the Yufind server. This should result in faster search results. Let us know if you see improvements or run into problems.

In order to perform a system upgrade to Yufind, we will be taking Yufind offline Monday morning. We expect service to return by early afternoon.

When the service returns, we hope to see a performance improvement. Additionally, you should notice speed improvements in the next weeks as we upgrade the software to a new version.