Dr R. Sanderson wrote:
> Eric,
>
> How is this 'new type' of index any different from an index of OAI-PMH 
> harvested material?  Which in turn is no different from any other local 
> search, just a different method of ingesting the data?
>
> Sounds like good PR to me, rather than a revolution ;)
>   
I don't know about "revolution". But your right that this _approach_ is 
similar to an OAI-PMH approach sure. But getting this approach to 
actually work reliably and succesfully with published scholarly articles 
-- is NOT easy.  Most of these publishers and aggregators do not have 
OAI-PMH feeds. (And even if they did, the typical OAI-PMH feed supplying 
only OAI-DC data does NOT provide sufficient structured metadata for a 
search of scholarly content).

Most of them do not share their metadata freely.  You need to have an 
individual relationship with each one, and you need workflow in place on 
your end to make sure you have updated metadata for each one, and you 
need to deal with the inevitable bugs and bad data from the publishers 
and vendors, and you need to do some normalizing so that they can all 
actually live together in an index that works for the user.

This is not an easy thing to do. I believe that some library consortiums 
have long histories of trying to do this (OhioLink?); some have given up 
and no longer try to do it (CDL I think?), because it's very expensive 
and difficult to do right.

If SerialSolutions has succeeded in doing it so it works well, and can 
provide it an affordable cost -- this will, in my opinion be huge.

It's not the basic technology of having a local index that's 
"revolutionary".  It's, potentially, applying that technology to this 
particular case, and actually having it produce something that works 
well for end-users, and being able to do it at an affordable cost. 

But certainly you don't have to be SerialSolutions to do this. I hope 
that the product succeeds, and I hope that it gets 'competitors' 
(library consortial and other vendors) so we have options.

But if it was so easy to do affordably, we'd have it already, right?

Jonathan



> Rob
>
> On Tue, 21 Apr 2009, Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
>   
>> On Apr 21, 2009, at 10:40 AM, Mike Taylor wrote:
>>     
>>> I, and most of the people I've worked with, have been using the terms
>>> "metasearch", "federated search", "broadcast search" and "distributed
>>> search" synonymously for years.  Have they now settled down into
>>>       
>
>   
>> But I believe we are also seeing a new type of index manifesting
>> itself, and this new index has yet to be named. Specifically, I'm
>> thinking of the index where various types of content is aggregated
>> into a single index and then queried. For example, instead of
>> providing a federated search against one or more library catalogs, a
>> Z39.50 accessible journal article index, a local cache of harvested
>> OAI content, etc., I think we are beginning to see all of these
>> content silos (and others) brought together into a single (Solr/
>> Lucene) index and searched simultaneously. I'm not sure, but I think
>> this is how Summon works.
>>     
>
>