Erl10 web scale-gb-sg

Harvesting from Many Silos at Web-scale Makes eContent Truly Discoverable
George Boston
Electronic Resources and Serials Librarian
Western Michigan University
Scott Garrison
Associate Dean for Public Services and Technology
Western Michigan University

The Challenge – How Best to Serve the Users…
Broad discovery of both known and known items in our collections, not just in their discipline
Students aren't as concerned where the
results come from, as long as it's relevant
Faculty need interdisciplinary research
Be more like Google: simple, easy, fast
Fewer places to look for more kinds of content
Single search interface
Get to the actual item in fewest clicks possible

Users are faced with wading through several information silos to get what they need:
OPACs
Electronic resources (e-journals, e-books, databases, articles, etc.)
Separate interfaces
Multiple targets for the same resources
Local Resources (ContentDM, Luna)

Vendor acquisitions, consolidation, catch-up
Some products are still years away
Open source options are emerging
New standards are forming
FRBR, FRAD, FRSAR, KBART, RDA, etc.
These lead to great FUD (Flux, Uncertainty, Disruption)
Everything we're doing is on shifting sands
Changing Marketplace:

Allows some general, discipline searching
Mixed, incomplete results
Especially if one or more databases “fail”
As slow as the slowest silos
If local, very network-inefficient
Many different metadata schemas, less sophisticated searching
One solution: Cross-silo Federated search

Another solution: “Web Scale discovery”
Metadata is harvested from various content sources and searches are conducted against a single index, this...
Reduces latency that federated searches have
Normalizes the metadata in a common search interface for a more consistent search and display
Easily scalable
Hardware upgrades to the “Cloud”
No need to rely on Vendor hardware upgrades

Searching for the 21 st century
One search box
Searching through multiple silos at once
User-centered design, based on research
Puts our metadata to better use
Faceted searching
Relevant results are presented to the User
Advantages of Web Scale discovery

Built on 21 st century technology
Ajax, API
SOLR – provides speed optimized indexing
Highly configurable interfaces
Design the interface to look the way we want
Can integrate well with other discovery tools (VuFind, Primo, etc)
Other advantages…

“ Web Discovery” solutions:
Serials Solutions Summon
Ex Libris Primo Central
Ebsco Discovery Service
Innovative Interfaces Encore Discovery
OCLC WorldCat Local

Summon http://wmich.summon.serialssolutions.com/

Summon Search Results:

Primo Central
http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/PrimoCentral

EbscoHost Discovery Service
http://www.ebscohost.com/discovery/default.php?id=1
Demo:
http://www.ebscohost.com/discovery/flashDemos/CDSDemo/CDS_Demo.htm

Encore Discovery
http://encoreforlibraries.com

WorldCat Local
http://www.oclc.org/us/en/worldcatlocal/default.htm

Implementing Summon at WMU
Why discovery at WMU?
Dissatisfaction with federated search options
Cost was a big factor (MetaLib required Primo – so we'd need two products rather than just one)
We tried a 360 Search trial – results disappointing
LibQual survey
Users wanted a single search box – ala Google
Strategic plans – University and Library
Optimizing discoverability of resources

WMU background
Carnegie research university
Undergrad enrollment = 25,000+
5 libraries serving multiple sites statewide
1.7M+ bibliographic records
400+ databases
4,500+ print journals
42,000+ online journals, newspapers
80,000+ online books
Voyager, SFX, EZproxy, CONTENTdm, Luna
Summon and VuFind as discovery systems

Timeline for implementation
2009 March – signed as Beta partner
2009 June – Initially operational as a “pre-Beta”
2009 September – Rolled out to the public as a “trial”
2010 January – Integrated into the web site
2010 Fall – Fully integrated into main tabbed box

Integrating Summon into our web site

Set up challenges
Extract local data from OPAC (Voyager)
Previously this had been done for VuFind, and
MelCat (a Michigan-wide Union catalog)
Extract From our ERMS (Verde)
Extract from SFX
Tweak information in Summon client center

Configuration challenges
Consistent metadata
Backstage clean-up of OPAC data
Requires Summon to re-ingest/re-index the catalog data
“ Match and Merge” to eliminate duplicate entries for articles – this is still in development
Inconsistent linking to resources
Only good as publisher metadata and interface
Not all vendors are OpenURL “compliant”

On-Going maintenance challenges
Summon Client Center is a bit clunky
Still a work-in-progress
Limited usage statistics capability
No tool for local configuration in the client center yet
Full integration into Client Center expected later in 2010

Using the system
Advantages
Agile development cycle – frequent feature releases
Integrates well with VuFind
Good place to begin research
Great for interdisciplinary research
Disadvantages
Can't easily specify targeted index searching like in VuFind – Summon basically searches one big index
It's not built like the search interfaces we've used in the past
Hard to tell what exactly is included – not a clean match

Evaluation and the way forward
Focus groups and Usability Studies
“ What databases are included?”
Better interface design
Use of the API allows us to build an interface
Integrating into Subject and other guides
Will it allow Librarians to stop teaching about interfaces, but rather how to valuate results?

Thank you for your attention.
Questions?
George Boston - [email_address]
Scott Garrison - scott.garrison@wmich.edu

Erl10 web scale-gb-sg

by George Boston on May 07, 2010

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

1 Embed 3

Statistics

Erl10 web scale-gb-sg — Presentation Transcript