Hi,

Today, we’re (finally!) announcing the release of the NCSU Libraries'
QuickSearch ( http://search.lib.ncsu.edu/ ) codebase, which can be found
here:

https://github.com/NCSU-Libraries/quick_search

QuickSearch is the custom federated search application with bento-box style
results that was initially developed at NCSU Libraries in 2005. The version
that we are releasing today is based on a rewrite of the application in
Ruby on Rails, and was originally launched into production in May 2014.

The aim of the open source release is to provide a toolkit for easily
creating custom bento-box search applications. QuickSearch provides core
functionality for handling searching multiple sources. It makes it easy to
write new searcher modules that interface with your existing library
services. We’ve included a Vagrantfile and Ansible playbooks so that you
can easily get a working copy of QuickSearch up and running in a virtual
environment with only a couple steps, regardless of whether you’re running
Windows, Mac, or Linux.

This should be considered an early release, and is extracted from the code
that we run in production. That being said, we still have some TODO items
related to porting some of the functionality over, and improving the
documentation.

QuickSearch provides a modular environment to create or customize searcher
modules and themes, which are published and released as separate gems.
We’ve released a few modules that are usable out of the box (don’t require
API keys, etc) as examples. We’re looking to maintain a collection of
reusable modules to avoid duplication of effort and make it easier to get
bento-box search up and running using the services that your library
subscribes to. QuickSearch provides search analytics functionality that
will collect statistics for each included module automatically, and
provides a tabular view of those statistics to aid in assessment.

For more information about NCSU Libraries' implementation of QuickSearch
and the history of the project, see:
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/reports/quicksearch

If you have any issues or questions, please contact us. You can send me an
email at [log in to unmask] , or if you have a specific issue with the
software, feel free to open an issue on GitHub:
https://github.com/NCSU-Libraries/quick_search/issues

Thanks,

Kevin Beswick
NCSU Libraries