[Web4lib] Does anyone need a federated OPAC search?

[Ross Singer]

Hi Peter,

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 9:09 PM, Peter Noerr <pnoerr at museglobal.com> wrote:
> Ross,
>
> Can you expound a bit on the last paragraph - about how awful the commercial fed search systems are - and the lack of imagination (mostly the lack of imagination)?
>
Those are actually two different thoughts:  failings of federated
search systems are inherent in the environment they exist in.  No
amount of imagination can create a reality where all fed. search
targets return relevant, easily merge-able, timely results
consistently both in service and metadata.

That said, I think fed. search services have value -- they serve a
space that needs to be  addressed (it is the only way to search many
of these resources at the same time) and need to be flexible enough to
deal with the inconsistencies between providers.

Where the failure of imagination lies, in my mind, is that we're
talking about controlled and known sources -- sources that we can
harvest and manipulate the data in any way we wish for very specific
services:  services much more personal than discovery.  It is not a
failure of any piece of technology:  these are solutions that require
humans thinking about what the humans they are trying to help actually
need and working with their colleagues at other organizations to help
facilitate these services.

Another project I had while at Georgia Tech was the Umlaut, an
application that served as an interface to OpenURL link resolvers.  It
did several things (most of which are out of scope for this thread),
but one of its design principles (although it never made it into the
production implementation at GaTech or the now main development
contributor, Johns Hopkins) was to allow users to add all of their
affiliations:  if they were a joint student at other institution (such
as Emory) or their public library, or they had alumni borrowing
privileges from their undergraduate school or if they place they
worked had a corporate library.  The Umlaut's concept of "appropriate
copy" wasn't placed with any institution, but with the users
themselves, since it was quite likely the collection(s) they had
access to were a superset of any one library and it was naive (and
arrogant) for the library to think that they should assume they hold
all of the keys to appropriate copy.

Ironically, I was never even able to set up a prototype with my own
credentials, since my public library had no machine-readable way to
access it.

So I hope that's not a rant - but understand that I hardly hold
federated search products responsible for their downsides, although I
do hold the marketing and sales departments accountable for billing
them as something they're not.

-Ross.

> [For some reason this thread of emails is arriving in reverse order (and I still haven't got the 1:15PM from Tim from which you snip), so I am asking this a bit blind, as it may have been covered already.]
>
> I'm not asking for a rant, but some of the points where you think they/we (yes I'm one) fail most miserably - in this particular area.
>
> Peter Noerr
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org [mailto:web4lib-
>> bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Ross Singer
>> Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2010 10:25
>> To: Tim Spalding
>> Cc: web4lib at webjunction.org
>> Subject: Re: [Web4lib] Does anyone need a federated OPAC search?
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 1:15 PM, Tim Spalding <tim at librarything.com> wrote:
>> > I'm getting a lot of replies, but they're from big institutions with
>> > big needs and, usually, existing systems. It's obvious where the
>> > "money" is at, but it's also a solved problem. There are commercial
>> > solutions and, as Jeremy Frumkin pointed out to me, there is a
>> > high-quality open source solution for institutions with Z39.50
>> > targets, LibraryFind from Oregon State (http://libraryfind.org).
>> >
>> There are scores of libraries (even large libraries -- Atlanta-Fulton
>> County Public Library, for example) that either don't have Z39.50
>> servers or don't expose them for whatever reason.
>>
>> I think the need is there at all levels - even where the "solved
>> problem" is supposedly at, it's not.  They just target the "obvious",
>> "political" and "easy" targets.
>>
>> I feel there's a huge failure of imagination in this space, and the
>> "big money" federated search systems (and their general awfulness)
>> only exacerbates this by supposedly packaging an answer.
>>
>> -Ross.
>>
>>
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>
>