Hi Peter,
Thanks for your input.

As far as my organisation goes we have not made any commitments yet. At
this stage we are just investigating what would be a better option for
us.
Coming form  the library background I thought it would be beneficial for
library to embed (read: market) our products and services into internal
resources via enterprise search. That may or may not be a good way to go
about it. I know that some librarians would rather have their own
federated search available on library pages that only covers aggregator
databases plus maybe a catalogue thus making that search separate to
whatever else organisation may want to cover with any other searches.

That is why I wanted to get feedback from other libraries to see if
anyone went down this road - why did they do it and is it working for
them.

Besides making this choice it would also be good to know how easy it
would be to  implement and/or utilise either a live search or a search
engine. As you said, it is obvious Steve and his team put a lots of work
in this.  Build vs. buy usually evolves around do you have sufficient
resources or not. 

It would be good to hear from other libraries even if it's only to share
what kind of search they utilise, why and are they happy with it.

Regards
Renata Dyer 

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Peter Noerr
Sent: Friday, 11 July 2008 11:09 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Enterprise Search and library collection
[SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

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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