As we continue to charge towards the Taylor Family Digital Library here at the U of Calgary, the idea of unified discovery services is suddenly popping up frequently in casual (work) conversations and meetings. This is especially relevant at the UofC as our umbrella organizational structure is called Libraries and Cultural Resources (LCR) and consists of the Library, Archives, Museum, and University Press. We desperately want to be able to allow our users to search across all our collections, not just bibliographic.
One of the products we're interested in is Summon, by Serials Solutions. I just watched a 5-minute marketing video, and liked what I saw (though of course that's the purpose of a marketing video, eh?). Primo is another example of this newish type of beast, and just earlier this week at the Code4Lib conference Bess Sadler of UVa presented Blacklight as a unified discovery platform (slides in PDF). Holy cow, I just stumbled across Blacklight when trying to come up with any more examples for this post, and I think I'm in love!
Blacklight is an open source OPAC (online public access catalog). That means
libraries (or anyone else) can use it to allow people to search and browse their
collections online. Blacklight uses Solr to index and search, and it has a highly configurable Ruby on Rails front-end. Currently,
Blacklight can index, search, and provide faceted browsing for MaRC records and
several kinds of XML documents, including TEI, EAD, and GDMS. Blacklight was
developed at the University of Virginia
Library and is made public under an Apache 2.0
license.
Try using Blacklight in a
UVA Library experimental interface. Download the source
code. And join the
mailing list to stay updated on new developments and releases.</post hijack>
Ok, where was I going… Crap, I got so sidetracked by Blacklight that I completely forgot where I was going with this post.
Well, I guess stay tuned. There are some starter links for you to explore. Are you guys coming along for this ride, or do you only care/need to search bibliographic records?
Comments
2 Responses to “Unified Discovery Services”
Good luck on your search and quest for Unified Discovery Services.
There are a number of considerations for picking the right solution, and a roll-it-your own approach using backlight can help you save money (if you have the in-house talent to truly take advantage of it), but don’t forget about a few issues often overlooked.
First, if you’re going to use it to federate remote sources (i.e. sources outside your organization), depending on the number, it could become quite tedious as sources change their look-and-feel or you have to manage outside credentials.
Second, depending on what you can unify (i.e. index locally) versus federate, you need to balance a number of factors to maximize the value of the presentation layer. Two factors that come to mind are quality/quantity of the metadata and source limitations. A roll-it-your-own solution will usually require you to dummy-down your presentation layer to least-common-denominators. Something to consider.
There are a number of other considerations, of course. If you haven’t already, you might want to check out http://www.federatedsearchblog.com, which has some great insight for unified (less so) and federated (more so) solutions.
Finally, the obligatory plug: Check out some of the work we’ve done at http://www.biznar.com, http://www.mednar.com and http://www.scitopia.org. 😉
Take care and good luck! Larry.
Thanks Larry, I do subscribe to the Federated Search Blog (please please please enable the full text through your feed, not just teasers!).