As one of the developers involved in the VuFind Open Source project, I
want to comment on one wrong statement in this email:

Am 07.11.2011 09:26, schrieb Bernhard Eversberg:

> (No mean feat,
> I think, even today. Even something like VuFind takes in MARC and
> nothing else.)

This is not true. VuFind is designed to deal with all kinds of text
based "record formats". The Solr search engine, that is used for search
and retrieval in VuFind, is record format agnostic. It has no clue of
MARC or any other "traditional library record format".
The display layer of VuFind can display all kinds of data formats
through a mechanism called "record drivers". The technical documentation
is here: http://vufind.org/wiki/other_than_marc
In fact, neither search nor (major parts of) record display in current
VuFind is based on MARC21 structures (see the source code, it is open).
VuFind comes with convenient out of the box import mechanisms for MARC
records, because it is still the "universal format" in the library
world. But you can easily build your own import chains for different
formats or use the existing import mechanisms of Solr. For example Eric
Lease Morgan wrote down in a blog post how he deals with the EAD format
in VuFind in a mixed EAD/MARC21 environment:
http://www.catholicresearch.net/blog/2010/11/vufind-record-drivers-and-templates/

It is true, that VuFind in its core sticks to the general "record
paradigm" (as most software used in library environments). Though VuFind
makes heavy use of linking mechanisms to pull in data from external
resources (from holdings data to additional material like reviews, cover
images or text excerpts from sources on the web), it is not what you
would imagine as a "linked data application" based on RDF. There is a
simple reason: VuFind is usually deployed in an environment that is
based on the "record paradigm thinking and design", not on a "linked
data paradigm". But it seems, that the library world is just starting to
explore different approaches. And I would expect, that development of
software to support these different approaches will go hand in hand with
the process, as needed.

With best regards,
Till Kinstler

-- 
Till Kinstler
Verbundzentrale des Gemeinsamen Bibliotheksverbundes (VZG)
Platz der Göttinger Sieben 1, D 37073 Göttingen
[log in to unmask], +49 (0) 551 39-13431, http://www.gbv.de