A VuFind Index of Alaska North Slope Gas Resources

Every day we learn about new and diverse users of the VuFind discovery interface. Just recently, the Alaska Resources Library & Information Services (ARLIS) contacted us for some help with "The Pipe Files", a VuFind-powered index of Alaska North Slope natural gas pipeline work from the past 40 years. This specialized collection is an invaluable resource to researchers and workers in this field.

ARLIS had been using VuFind for some time, but had a list of changes and improvements they needed help with. 

The records available in The Pipe Files VuFind site are cataloged in ARLIS’s main library system and exported to MARC format for import to VuFind. Records include a link to a PDF report stored on the ARLIS document server.

Over a few months, Andornot helped with the following improvements to the site:

• We adjusted the VuFind-MARC field mapping to suit the particular characteristics of these records and to bring MARC tags into the most appropriate VuFind fields.
• We rearranged, added, and removed fields from the search results and full record display to best present the information in these records.
• We configured Apache Tika to extract the full text of PDFs and make it searchable.
• We configured ImageMagick to generate cover images of the cataloged PDFs, in various sizes, and display them when viewing records.

This sort of fune-tuning resulted in a more polished and usable search interface for this unique collection. Try it out at http://www.arlis.org/vufind/ 

Contact Andornot for help with your VuFind site, or to discuss a search interface to any collections you have.