[LIS-Forum] Single search is a need of the hour

[Rajesh Chandrakar]

Hello folks, 

The time has come for libraries, too, to negotiate for rights to index full text locally. Have a look the article on "Metasearch like Google" http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6413442.html based on the following project:

Ontario Scholars Portal
The Scholars Portal Project of the Ontario Council of University Libraries aims to bring together a number of key digital services for member libraries. Alan Darnell, manager of the project, says they decided that "single search" was a key service to be provided and that for the reasons of performance, reliability, and flexibility, local-loading of article metadata was the best approach. Darnell says that with Google Scholar, "It's not always clear who the publishers are, the scope of the content [or] the depth of the content.... Even if Google Scholar had the coverage, we'd still feel the responsibility to do the local loading. I don't think there's any reason we can't do it better [than Google]." 

Darnell says they have succeeded in creating a metasearch environment through local loading that works better and more powerfully than typical cross-search: "In a [cross-search] environment, after you've done that first search, you need to drop into the native interface to do anything else. In our [locally indexed] single search, [users] can stay within our environment longer, although eventually they might still need to drop into the native interface." The Scholars Portal single search also allows member libraries to create custom subject or disciplinary "clusters" by selecting from available databases that have been locally indexed. 

The Scholars Portal single search is only in its beginning stages, but Darnell says that initial evidence suggests success: "Our usage numbers show that if you make it easier to search, users get presented to the journal literature in greater numbers than they would if they only had the specialized search engine. There's always time later on to teach them specialized searching if that's what they want to do. I don't see any disadvantages in lowering that learning curve." Just as importantly, with the local indexing technique, the power and features of a metasearch tool can be significantly increased, especially if you can get access to full text to load as an aid to the searching algorithms: "As we do get more and more full text, we will be able to get meaningful relevancy ranking, useful clustering, more advanced presentation of result sets," and other advanced features that will serve more needs without requiring the user switch to a "native" interface. 

Rajesh

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Rajesh Chandrakar, Commonwealth Professional Fellow
Scientific & Technical Officer

INFLIBNET (INFormation and LIBrary NETwork) Centre
An IUC of University Grants Commission
Near Gujarat University Guest House,
PB No. 4116, Navrangpura, 
Ahmedabad - 380 009, India

Tel.     +91-(0)79-26305971/ 8528/ 4695(O), 26873805(R)
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Fax:   +91-(0)79-26300990, 263007816

E-mail: rajesh at inflibnet.ac.in; rchandrakar at gmail.com
Website: http://www.inflibnet.ac.in
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