Hi Steve and Renata,

First the declaration of interest: I am the CTO of a federated search
system company. However I am not trying to suggest you should use our
(or any) federated search system (so I will, coyly, not attach a
signature to this email).

I am interested in your comments on either or both of two questions:

Use an search engine and create an aggregated database/index of all the
material from the organization, or use a federated search system to
search the repositories/catalogs/databases/etc. in real time? Did you
consider both? And why the choice you made?

Build vs. Buy? It obviously has taken Steve and his colleagues a lot of
hard work to produce a nice looking system (except for all those big
black bits on the screen!) and it obviously takes maintenance (it is
'fragile') Do you think it was/is worth it and if so why?

Peter Noerr

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of
> Steve Oberg
> Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2008 8:21 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Enterprise Search and library collection
> [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]
> 
> Renata and others,
> 
> After posting my original reply I realized how dumb it was to respond
> but
> say, sorry, can't tell you more.  As an aside, this is one of the
> things
> that irritates me the most about working in a for profit environment:
> the
> control exerted by MPOW over just about anything. But hey, this is the
> job
> situation I've consciously chosen so, I guess I shouldn't complain.
> 
> Although I can't name names and go into detail about our
> implementation, I
> have "anonymized" screenshots of various aspects of it and posted
> details
> about it at
> http://familymanlibrarian.com/2007/01/21/more-on-turning-the-catalog-
> inside-out/
> Keep in mind that my involvement has been focused on the catalog side.
> A
> lot of the behind-the-scenes work also dealt with matching subject
> terms in
> catalog records to the much simpler taxonomy chosen for our website.
> You
> can imagine that it can be quite complicated to set up a good rule set
> for
> matching LCSH or MeSH terms effectively to a more generic set of
> taxonomy
> terms and have those be meaningful to end users. We are continually
> evaluating and tweaking this setup.
> 
> As far as other general details, this implementation involved a lot of
> people, in fact a team of about 15, some more directly and exclusively
> and
> others peripherally.  In terms of maintenance, day to day maintenance
> is
> handled by about three FTE.  Our library catalog data is refreshed
once
> a
> day, as is the citation database to which I referred in the previous
> email,
> and content from our web content management environment.  A few other
> repositories are updated weekly because their content isn't as
> volatile.
> The whole planning and implementation process took a year and is still
> really working through implementation issues. For example we recently
> upgraded the version of our enterprise search tool to a newer version
> and
> this was a major change requiring a lot of resources and it took a lot
> more
> time to do than expected.
> 
> I hope this additional information is helpful.
> 
> Steve
> 
> On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 1:11 AM, Dyer, Renata
> <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
> 
> > Our organisation is looking into getting an enterprise search and I
> was
> > wondering how many libraries out there have incorporated library
> > collection into a 'federated' search that would retrieve a whole
lot:
> > a library collection items, external sources (websites, databases),
> > internal documents (available on share drives and/or records
> systems),
> > maybe even records from other internal applications, etc.?
> >
> >
> > I would like to hear about your experience and what is good or bad
> about
> > it.
> >
> > Please reply on or offline whichever more convenient.
> >
> > I'll collate answers.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Renata Dyer
> > Systems Librarian
> > Information Services
> > The Treasury
> > Langton Crescent, Parkes ACT 2600 Australia
> > (p) 02 6263 2736
> > (f) 02 6263 2738
> > (e) [log in to unmask]
> >
> > <https://adot.sirsidynix.net.au/uhtbin/cgisirsi/ruzseo2h7g/0/0/49>
> >
> >
> >
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