[Sigia-l] integrated catalogues?

[Steve Toub]

My sense is that this is largely a technical limitation (and a lack of 
imagination?) of having separate silo systems powering different databases.

There is a category of software in the library world called federated 
searching metasearching (current thread on this on WEB4LIB-L) but to 
execute the parallel queries on silo systems, merge and de-dupe takes 
far longer than what users have come to expect on something like Google 
Scholar.

NSCU Libraries are doing interesting work along the lines of what you're 
thinking. See their presentation on "In Search of the Single Search Box: 
Building a "First-step" Library Search Tool"
http://www.diglib.org/forums/spring2005/presentations/morris0504.htm
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/dli/staff/tsierra/dlf-ncsu-qs-demo.wmv

	--SET

Steve Toub
California Digital Library





Patrick Kennedy wrote:
> Anyone care to discuss the relative pros and cons of integrating a bunch 
> of databases/catalogues under one search interface, versus separate 
> interfaces?
> 
> For example, anyone here work on the British Library website? They have 
> quite a few catalogues, with separate search interfaces for (and 
> different ways of presenting results, different sets of advanced options 
> etc etc etc)
> 
> Is this a technical limitation? Like, each is in a different database 
> and so they haven't got around to integrating them....or is there a user 
> experience benefit in doing it this way?
> 
> Obviously if you're looking for a particular type of content (manuscript 
> as opposed to photo) you might expect to use a different search 
> interface, but couldn't a drop-down list with several options handle 
> this? Or even simply formatting each result record based on the type of 
> material it represents?
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 
> And yes I am thinking specifically within the context of a library website.
> 
> cheers
> 
> Pat
> 
>