Albert's travel diary: The VuFind® Adventure Continues – Scaling and Shaping Discovery

This presentation provides an overview of the past year’s developments in ALBERT, a discovery system based on VuFind® of the cooperative library network Berlin-Brandenburg (KOBV). ALBERT runs as a multi-instance platform with a centralized Solr index for several member libraries and research institutions. We recently completed the migration of the majority of our instances to VuFind® as well as the migration from version 7.1 to 10.1. As part of our effort to adopt more standard VuFind® components, we present a prototype of a default VuFind® instance running in Kubernetes. Separately, we are evaluating RecordManager for potential use in backend metadata processing. Finally, we introduce SolrProxy, a gatekeeper middleware developed at KOBV that bridges between ALBERT and the Solr index. It enables flexible parameterization of fine-grained mapping, boosting, and filtering to serve diverse user groups more effectively. Deploying SolrProxy in Kubernetes improves scalability and automatic workload balancing across multiple VuFind® instances.