From the announcement at libraryfind.org: "This release folds a few of the functions being added to 0.9 into the 0.8.x branch, as well as changes being made to accommodate some enhanced harvesting, etc."

The rails-based Blacklight OPAC has released major and minor upgrades since it was last mentioned here. Latest code and plugin attached here, but see their news site for the latest and all the related docs, or the rubyforge page for the latest dev details.

Note: the main tarball is too big to list automatically below but is available here at blacklight-2.1.tgz.

As seen at Rubyforge: Blacklight is "a next generation library catalog written in ruby, using solr as the underlying search engine. All you have to do is export your marc records, index them with the scripts provided, start up ruby on rails, and you're on your way to faceted browsing bliss."

Links to a demo, docs, and the project list are all available at blacklight.rubyforge.org.

RefDB has changed a lot since the last mention of it here. From the latest release news on fm:

"The PHP Web interface supports live links for keywords, authors, and periodicals which are displayed as "tag clouds". Automatic format detection from local files is done, and has a type-sensitive form for editing data. RefDB implements all SRU operations (explain, searchRetrieve, scan) with MODS output, and conforms to CQL Level 2. Namespaced XML output allows processing of schema-based TEI P5 and DocBook V.5.0 documents. Raw bibliographies were added. Searching for and styling of less-common fields was improved."

The source, perl client, and sru support code are attached.

The LibraryFind crew has released version 0.8.2, which promises:

• Improved out-of-the-box user interface
• re-worked html/css architecture to support easier design customization
• new generic graphic design for out-of-the-box UI
• many, many bugfixes

Try this latest version out live at OSU.

A copy is attached.

As seen on oss4lib-discuss, Jeremy wrote: "We are pleased to announce the first public release of the LibraryFind metasearch software, developed by Oregon State University Libraries. LibraryFind is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). This first public release, version 0.7, has a number of advanced features, such as (but not limited to): 2-click user workflow (one click to find, one click to get), an integrated OpenURL resolver, a 2-tiered caching system to improve search response time, and a customizable user interface. As this is a pre-1.0 release, there are still a number of features, functions, and efficiencies we plan to add to the software. We encourage involvement from others in the library community who are interested in working on an open source metasearch product. More information on LibraryFind, including information on how to download and run the software, can be found at libraryfind.org."

I've been working on this project, and am excited to see it out there finally. There's a lot of good stuff in there already, and I'm sure that we'll be able to improve on it rapidly with many more eyeballs on it.

ruby-marc is a lightweight ruby library for liberating your legacy bibliographic data.