Google has set the standard for searching not only for our users, but also for a lot of librarians. Several surveys at the library show that the users want a simple, Google-like interface that will quickly provide them with relevant results. Federated search was implemented at libraries in an attempt to compete with Google/Google scholar. This failed because of the limitations of this technology - the small number of resources that could be searched simultaneously, the speed and the problems encountered merging results and dealing with all the different and constantly changing interfaces.
So what is a web-scale discovery system?
Content
Delivery
How?
Each vendor has agreements with several content suppliers from whom they harvest materials. In addition, they harvest locally held material such as existing library catalogues and institutional repositories within the library using protocols such as OAI-PMH and FTP. Pre-harvesting eliminates the need to merge results as was the case with federated search, which in turn makes de-duplication and relevancy ranking easier.
Users can search all available metadata, but authentication is needed to get access to full text. In this way, Google-like functionality is provided to a delimited collection of resources.
Examples: «The big 4»
Find links to system here:
Unified Resource Discovery Comparison https://sites.google.com/site/urd2comparison/home
Read more:
Jason Vaughan. Web Scale Discovery What and Why? Library Technology reports. 2011
Exercises
Content
- harvest content from local and remotely hosted repositories
- create a centralized index—to the article level
- suited for rapid search and retrieval of results ranked by relevancy.
- harvesting of local library resources, combined with brokered agreements with publishers and aggregators allowing access to metadata and/or full-text content
- single search box providing a Google-like search experience
Delivery
- quick results ranked by relevancy
- modern interface offering functionality such as faceted navigation to drill down to more specific results
- agnostic to underlying systems,
- open compared to traditional library systems and allow a library greater possibility to customize the services
How?
Each vendor has agreements with several content suppliers from whom they harvest materials. In addition, they harvest locally held material such as existing library catalogues and institutional repositories within the library using protocols such as OAI-PMH and FTP. Pre-harvesting eliminates the need to merge results as was the case with federated search, which in turn makes de-duplication and relevancy ranking easier.
Users can search all available metadata, but authentication is needed to get access to full text. In this way, Google-like functionality is provided to a delimited collection of resources.
Examples: «The big 4»
Find links to system here:
Unified Resource Discovery Comparison https://sites.google.com/site/urd2comparison/home
Read more:
Jason Vaughan. Web Scale Discovery What and Why? Library Technology reports. 2011
Exercises
- Open the link Unified Resource Discovery Comparison. Take a look at some of the tools mentioned in the article. Compare them with Google
- Are this kind of tools useful for your library?
