[Web4lib] Federated search products and FullText/PeerReviewlimiting

[arhyno at uwindsor.ca]

Way back on April 18, Roy Tennant wrote:

>Even better would be to have the ability to limit search results to
>full-text resources, but as has been said here that is still
>difficult and often out of our hands (vendors need to support it). So
>no, the problem is far from solved, at least from the perspective of
>good user service.

Ever the consistent and insightful scribe, Roy documented the advantages 
of this kind of limit function brilliantly a few years ago in "The Trouble 
with Online" <http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA452319/>, and I have 
been hung up on  it ever since Roy's article and grimacing through a 
particular rash of comments in a survey here around the same time that 
included zingers like "don't show it to me unless you can deliver it NOW". 
The "full text" status workarounds involving images and so on that have 
emerged on this thread are well worth pursuing, and are a big step forward 
from the "click and hope" model that resolvers seem to represent now. But 
the idea of scoping results based on availability might conceivably be 
powered by a common index format. There's an interesting example in the 
book "Lucene in Action" for combining indexes at remote sites using 
Lucene, and I wonder if the appearance of open source and network savvy 
indexers makes limiting feasible in real time across different systems. 
Imagine if you indexed your resolver data with Lucene and a content 
provider made an index of holdings available using the same tool. Or maybe 
you want to use a subset of what's in the knowledge base, or use some 
other source for identifying accessible material. Lucene seems to be very 
efficient at combining indexes, and then limiting based on the process, 
and there are probably other systems that can jump through similar hoops. 
It would be interesting to take a service with publically available 
citation data and combine it with an indexed rendering of resolver content 
to see how efficient this could be made to function.

art
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Art Rhyno
Systems Librarian
http://librarycog.uwindsor.ca