Reading Notes - Week 8

Miller - Federated Searching: Put it in it's Place

The overwhelming success of Google offers powerful evidence as to which search model users prefer.

the universe of available content is no longer limited to that stored within the library walls. Moreover, the type of content required by users is often not cataloged by most libraries.

Providing books and other cataloged material is only one aspect of the modern library's charter.

Google has taught us, quite powerfully, that the user just wants a search box. Arguments as to whether or not this is "best" for the user are moot—it doesn't matter if it's best if nobody uses

Hane - The Truth about federated searching

Federated searching is a hot topic that seems to be gaining traction in libraries everywhere

It's very difficult to manage authentication for subscription databases, particularly for remote users

It's impossible to perform a relevancy ranking that's totally relevant.

You can't get better results with a federated search engine than you can with the native database search. The same content is being searched, and a federated engine does not enhance the native database's search interface. Federated searching cannot improve on the native databases' search capabilities. It can only use them.

Lossau - Search Engine TEchnology and Digital LIbraries

Libraries see themselves as central information providers for their clientele, at universities or research institutions. But how do they define academic content?

Libraries still see themselves as a place of collections rather than as an information "gateway". Other concerns of libraries are grounded in the fact that there is no guarantee that a remote host will maintain its resources in the long-term.

paper from Michael Bergman on the "Deep Web" [2], highlights the dimensions we have to consider. Bergman talks about one billion individual documents in the "visible" [3] and nearly 550 billion documents on 200,000 web sites in the "deep" web

Libraries are increasingly hesitant to support big, monolithic and centralised portal solutions equipped with an all-inclusive search interface which would only add another link to the local, customer-oriented information services.

particularly at universities, libraries deal with a range of users with often different usage behaviours. It almost goes without saying that an undergraduate has other demands for information than a qualified researcher, and their usage behaviours can vary substantially. Young undergraduates will try much harder to transfer their general information seeking behaviour (using internet search engines) to the specific, academic environment, while established researchers have better accommodated the use of specific search tools

Current digital library systems integrate predominantly online library catalogues and databases with some full text repositories (e.g. e-journal

The continual exponential growth in the volume of online web content as described above makes it unrealistic to believe that one library can build one big, all-inclusive academic web index. Even to provide a substantial part, such as indexing the academic online content of one country, would mean a major challenge to one institution. Thus, collaboration is required among libraries

Lynch - Z39.50 Information Retrieval

Z39.50 is one of the few examples we have to date of a protocol that actually goes beyond codifying mechanism and moves into the area of standardizing shared semantic knowledge. The extent to which this should be a goal of the protocol has been an ongoing source of controversy and tension within the developer community

"Information Retrieval (Z39.50); Application Service Definition and Protocol Specification, ANSI/NISO Z39.50-1995" -- is a protocol which specifies data structures and interchange rules that allow a client machine (called an "origin" in the standard) to search databases on a server machine (called a "target" in the standard) and retrieve records that are identified as a result of such a search

Z39.50 has its roots in efforts dating back to the 1970s to allow standardized means of cross-database searching among a handful of (rather homogeneous) major bibliographic databases hosted by organizations such as the Library of Congress, the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), and the Research Libraries Information Network

Z39.50 becomes linked to the semantics of the databases being searched in two primary areas: the attribute sets used to describe the access points being searched, and the record syntax (and related record composition control parameters in PRESENT) that are used to actually transfer records back from server to client.

OAI-PMH

designed to enable greater interoperability between digital libraries. simpler than Z39.50

works with structured data, specifically XML

document-like objects

primary purpose is to define a standard way to move metadata from point a to point b within the virtual information space of the www

OAI formed 1999

OAI-PMH 2000

formal public opening 2001 "open day"

NOT inherently open access, nor traditional ARCHIVES