George Machovec Associate Director Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries [email protected] Metasearch academic perspectives

George Machovec

Associate DirectorColorado Alliance of Research Libraries

[email protected]

Metasearch

academic perspectives

Colorado Alliance: Who Are We?

• Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries• A non-profit consortium of 12 libraries founded in

1974. 501c3• History of innovation

– CARL ILS (sold in 1995) – now TLC– UnCover (sold in 1995) – now Ingenta

• No relationship to current TLC/CARL• 12 staff


• Member of ICOLC• We do standard consortial stuff with a twist

– Database licensing– Data hosting (locally operate III, Endeavor,

CARL/TLC, Ovid, SilverPlatter)– Prospector (INN-Reach) regional union catalog– Software development (e.g. Gold Rush, Colorado

Digitization Project, The Charleston Advisor)– Operates over 20 servers with multiple T1s and BGP

Internet redundancy


• Auraria • CU/Boulder• CU/Health Sciences• CSU• Colo School of Mines• Denver Public Library

• Univ of Northern Colorado

• University of Denver• University of

Denver/Law• Regis University• Univ of Wyoming

MetaSearch What’s Important to Academics

• MetaSearch showcase held at Colorado Alliance 18 months ago

• Presentations by leading commercial services

• After presentations the participants discussed their interests and needs


• Research audience must be supported, but should also be able to serve adult, child, distance, scholarly, undergrad, doctoral, course-specific, and situational audiences.

• Good authentication tools. Ideally patrons should only need to authenticate once for access to all resources and content

• Good link checking tools that are flexible in implementation


• Easy to implement, learn and to use

• The Web workspace should be flexible and customizable to fit within the existing library design

• Uses should be able to customize the environment (personalize), but only if desired (many patrons don’t care to do this).


• Flexibility in target selection. In addition to primary librarian suggested sites, additional sites might be suggested by the interface for users to select.

• Cross protocol calls (Z39.50, http, SQL, SRW, SRU) should be supported.

• Supports adaptive technologies for ADA compliance.


• Content (selection lists) should be systematically selected and provided, offering guidance to users trying to identify targets. Good help for further information.

• New service alerts should be automatically provided without users having to search for them. Perhaps an SDI email service for academics notifying them of new database or service content in areas of interest.


• Display incoming results immediately to avoid dead wait time. Give user some indication that more is coming

• Ability to support many targets! Academics purchase much online.

• Security and privacy features should include the ability to set timeouts. SSL or similar encryption should be supported.

• De-duplication & priority setting for displays• PDA or PC tablet support


• Mimic institutional programming, e.g., areas of excellence • Links to and from online courseware. Better integration with

online classes.• Possible e-commerce support (e.g. document delivery) if

online content not available• Easy ability to go into native search interface mode if

necessary• Ability to use system statistics for future interface and

display. Perhaps heavily used resources given priority display. Dynamic?


• OpenURL enabled– Will help support linking with source services

that are not or have done it poorly– Would provide a uniform manner for

displaying links to further content– Needs to offer flexibility in link language,

graphics and placement

MetaSearch: Academic Targets

• Abstracting/Indexing Services• Publishers (e.g. Elsevier ScienceDirect) – important to

be able to pull togther• Aggregators• Electronic reserves• Local databases including digitization projects• OAI resources• Institutional repositories

Academic Metasearch SurveySelected responses

• How is interface categorized?– By subject categories. Some offer limiting by format (e.g.

full-text, images)– Some are targeting specific audiences (e.g. undergrads)

• Who implements– Implementation/management team. End-user interface by

Web librarian. Catalog librarian creates searching scripts – Assistant Electronic Resources librarian– Systems Department


• How many targets have you put in your interface?– 90 out of 250 after 6 months (a MetaLib site)– 70 out of 300 after 12 months (a FD site)– 30 after 3 months (limited license on Metafind)– 50 out of 200 after 6 months (an Endeavor site)


• Are you pointing to publisher specific websites?– Highwire, JSTOR (link only), IEEE (link only)

[a Metalib site]– JSTOR, ProjectMuse, Wiley, Scirus (a

MetaFind site)– Elsevier, Wiley, Blackwell Synergy, Highwire,

Kluwer (a FD site)


• How did you select which resources to add?– Paid ExLibris for some set-up. Did easy low-

hanging fruit. Asked selectors to prioritize products

– Used statistics for initial list. Assembled working groups in topical areas to select final targets

– Task forces were selected and got feedback from library staff


• Special or interesting targets?– ContentDM (for local digitization effort)– Classical.com– TARO (repository browse at the Univ of

Houston)– Local archives and manuscript collection


• What bothers you the most?– Options for end-user display not as flexible has

hoped– Getting the interface to work with campus

authentication– Linking to resources that do not easily support

an incoming search– Limits in the number of targets and/or returned

result sets due to IT


• What bothers you the most?– Lack of relevancy ranking

– Lack of knowing what fields can be search as this is is not standardized across targets

– Lack of sufficient (or poor quality) metadata that causes false or no hits

– Too much customization and ongoing maintenance by library

– Wish it was easier to set-up and maintain targets


• What do you like most?– One stop shopping– Great for undergrads!– Helps cut down on searching confusion with a

unified (common) interface– Good starting point and takes advantage of

librarian vetting for quality resources


• What do you like most?– Alerts and “my library” features– Saving searches– Love citation manager output (e.g. EndNote)

Documents

George Machovec Associate Director Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries [email protected] Metasearch academic perspectives