Webcast: The Potential of the Discovery Experience
RSSMarshall Breeding and Eric Lease Morgan ponder searching and content acquisition/distribution
Dodie Ownes -- Library Journal, 08/24/2009
- Continued demand for a “compelling library interface”
- Federated search hasn’t lived up to its promise
- Key to content today is indexes, not databases
Roughly 400 attendees joined library technology pundits Marshall Breeding and Eric Lease Morgan August 18 for the Serials Solutions sponsored webcast, Defining Web-Scale Discovery: The Promise of a Unified Search Index for Libraries. The one-hour session, moderated by Serials’ Solutions Andrew Nagy, senior discovery services engineer, provided a solid grounding in the history of search and content acquisition and distribution. The panelists then challenged the audience to think differently about how and what their library OPACs should be providing to users.
Breeding noted the continued demand for a “compelling library interface” and spoke to the inadequacies of current OPACs, saying that “silos prevail.” He also contended that federated search has not lived up to its promise and that the future of search lies in the use of consolidated, comprehensive online indexes. While local discovery focuses on customized access and content, web-scale discovery looks at unified access to a broad scope of content. With ‘deep search’ functionality, the opportunities increase to access full-text resources via Google Library Print and Open Content Alliance.
There are several players in the ‘discovery’ product marketplace, notably sponsor Serials Solutions’s Summon product, as well as offerings from OCLC, EBSCO, and Ex Libris. While the promise is great, Breeding warned that there are challenges in dealing with heterogeneous materials in a single index, and keeping that index current. At the end of the rainbow? “A single point of entry to all the content and services offered by the library.”
Options for unified search
Lease Morgan offered a short trip in the wayback machine from the days of stone tablets to current library resources to show how search and discovery has evolved. He too asserted that the key to content today is indexes, not databases. Echoing Breeding’s concern about silos of content, Lease Morgan presented two options for creating a unified search index and provided a recipe for doing this locally over a one-year period. Failing that, libraries can consider his ‘Plan B.’ Without the necessary staff, resources, and money, plus a high level of cooperation and energy, it may be best for libraries to contract with a third party.
One disadvantage of both plans, Lease Morgan noted, is that neither can provide a completely comprehensive index. There are elements of scale to consider—how many licensing deals must you make—and the continued need to accommodate very specific local indexes. Ultimately, the question comes down to whether you want to harvest or subscribe to content. “Web-scaled indexes are a step in the right direction,” summarized Lease Morgan, “but search is not enough.” Much still needs to be done to make text easier to use and to provide more context for the user.
Nagy fielded many questions with the panelists, ranging from concerns with information overload to how metadata can help to reduce the flood of false-positive results from full-text search. In response to a question on how the role of the cataloger is changing in systems that are reliant on publisher-provided information, Breeding responded that it is truly the expertise of these staff that are creating metadata, indexes, and resources that will make new discovery systems "halfway sane and rational.”
When one attendee raised a concern about the co-mingling of book and journal materials, Lease Morgan pointed out that journal and book content are being blurred, and “if information from one or the other addresses a patron’s need, what difference does it make where it came from?” Another attendee supported the assertion, chatting in “What does it matter? What's the difference between wikipedia and a journal article? Of course there are differences, and thus differences in search strategies for each.”
This webcast was the third in a four-part series sponsored by Serials Solutions and Library Journal. The fourth and final webcast, The Summon(TM) Service in Real Life: Early Adopter Libraries Speak Out on Web-Scale Discovery, is scheduled for Sept. 22 at 12 EDT.
