> That by trotting out their Endeca powered catalog, they've finally
> gotten the tangible that we nerds have been unable to get
> institutional support for.  Now every librarian in the country wants
> clustering and faceted search.

Ah, and look how they did it. To paraphrase an olde-tyme Internet
expression, they declared their vendor an obstacle and routed around it.
For years they had said "the OPAC sucks." But targeting ILS vendors
wasn't effective. Not enough people in LibraryLand care. What was the
incentive for a vendor to change over the occasional scattered peeping
of a few nerds? So they layered a faceted search engine on top of an
existing product. In doing so, they incidentally demonstrated the
"missing module" of the library catalog--user navigation.

Not sure every librarian wants clustering and faceted search, but one
can only hope. Btw, for you grow-your-own types, do check out Flamenco,
open source faceting software. Flamenco + indexer + stemmer + spell
check + some homebrewed SLA tool might equal a pretty nice search engine
to compensate for YOUR missing module.

Strategery--catch the fever!

Karen G. Schneider
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