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Upgrading Your OPAC with VuFind
Wesley D. Custer, Asbury Seminary

Asbury Seminary is a stand-alone, interdenominational semi-
nary offering graduate certificates, master’s degrees, and research 
degrees. The B. L. Fisher Library at Asbury Seminary has a significant 
collection for ministry and research in the form of both physical and 
digital items. As any modern library knows, the variety of resources 
can pose a difficulty in how these resources are discovered. Various 
discovery solutions are offered by big companies and open source 
products alike. We have been working to answer this question for 
years. Now we have decided to embrace the open source solution of 
VuFind to provide a fast and effective online public access catalog. 
VuFind is not the only system out there, but it uses technology that 
our team is comfortable with already.

The primary goal is to achieve a search experience that blends 
the professional-level desires of our library staff and the ease of use 
and aesthetics expected by our patrons. We find that, much of the 
time, the built-in OPAC in the ILS is not as customizable or aestheti-
cally pleasing as we would like. Not only that, but the indexing seems 
to not meet the expectations of our professional librarians, making 
training faculty a frustrating chore.

VuFind is an open source software designed to be a highly custom-
izable user interface for your library’s online public access catalog, 
or OPAC. It has been largely developed by Vilanova University and is 
used by other academic libraries with great success. There are other 
options. Blacklight is a notable option but it uses Ruby on Rails, which 
no one on our team knows. Why would a library want to “replace” 
their OPAC with a VuFind interface? It may be that the OPAC asso-
ciated with your library system (integrated library system, or ILS) 
may not be as customizable as you would like or the aesthetics don’t 
match what your institution requires from a branding perspective. 
Perhaps there is search functionality that you desire, like a specific 
kind of browse search that your ILS will not allow for. VuFind’s 
search capabilities are incredibly fast compared to systems that 
query a much busier database. Perhaps your library is a proponent of 
open source technologies and this fits the software ecosystem of your 



278  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

library. VuFind has a great community of support and activity. These 
are all good reasons to consider a third-party and open source OPAC. 

However, there are reasons not to choose VuFind and open source 
software in particular. While VuFind does the basics “out of the box,” 
it will require a great deal of time to make it what you and your insti-
tution wants in an OPAC. Hosting it yourself is not terribly difficult if 
you have the servers or the budget for cloud services. Open source 
technology is free like puppies. Sure, you can download and install 
it for free, but then all of the problems are yours and yours alone. 
Paying for hosting may be a better option and may be less expensive 
than using your own staff hours to build and maintain it.

Open source products take time, possibly a lot of time. I have 
been working on this project for a year now and we still do not have 
VuFind connected into our ILS because of limitations of VuFind’s 
connectivity with our specific ILS. It is not impossible, but we have 
to make significant use of external help and expertise to get it up and 
running. It is important to make sure that VuFind supports your ILS 
before beginning. While there is support for most major systems, 
always check. 

So, what do you need to get started? 
First, you need a server. For our implementation, we have an 

Ubuntu (Linux) server in a development environment in-house and 
the production environment in the cloud. We have chosen to hire a 
hosting and support company, but you could easily host it yourself 
if you have the skills. Server management is its own set of particu-
lar skills that can take a while to master. Jumping into this kind of a 
project without those skills would be unwise. VuFind has a page of 
potential companies to consider (vufind.org/vufind/support.html). If 
you choose to try it all yourself, the VuFind community through the 
listserv is very active and responsive. Also, confirm with your ILS 
admin that VuFind will work with your system.

Second, you need knowledge. Even hosting it with support can 
require that you know some about the technology behind VuFind. 
The basics of HTML, CSS, and PHP would be very helpful. If you really 
want to understand what makes it work, Apache Solr is what you 
really want to dive into. Ultimately, any system is best understood 
from the perspective of its database. The answer to the question of 
why a search in a system is not returning what you expect comes 
down to how the database is structured and how a query to that 
database functions. 

http://vufind.org/vufind/support.html


Posters  279

Third, you need time. Any open source system takes time. If you 
are hosting the system yourself, it can take a lot of time (installation, 
configuring, customizing, debugging, tweaking the indexing, etc.). 
Even if you have someone host it for you and they provide support, 
it still takes your time, perhaps less but you are now replacing your 
time with money. Which one is more important in your context? 

Having a highly customizable, fast, and affordable OPAC to inter-
face with your ILS can really be a benefit to your patrons. We have 
been able to make significant progress in customization and index-
ing by using VuFind. We expect to have our system up and running 
for the public by the end of 2020. In the end, finding information is 
the goal. Use the system that works in your context.


