Rummaging around the web - as you do - I came across a company called Endeca offering new ways of searching and presenting data in a whole range of industries. This led me to look at the NCSU catalogue and I liked what I saw. Easy searching and results presented in a way that allows refinement. NCSU are a Sirsi Unicorn customer which is why it caught my attention.
What Endeca says about itself.
“Endeca for Libraries is the most effective way for students, faculty and other members of the library community to find the book or resource they need and to discover new information they didn’t even know the library owned. That’s why North Carolina State University saw an increase of 240% in keyword searching after deploying Endeca. Endeca’s superior search integrated with the patented Guided Summarization experience encourages exploration and discovery. That experience increases usage of the library’s resources, increases re-circulation, and increases usage of legacy library collections.” http://endeca.com/byIndustry/media/libraries.html
See also http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/endeca/ for publications and presentations about the implementation of the OPAC.
Seeing this reminded me of another library browser that a colleague brought to my attention some time ago. The AquaBrowser is far more visually exciting. Check out the Dumfries and Gallloway catalogue . http://library.dumgal.gov.uk/abl/
What AquaBrowser says about itself.
“AquaBrowser Library’s capabilities transcend the limits of conventional OPAC searching. Its search front-end finds items using associations, context, and spelling alternatives automatically generated from your library’s catalog. AquaBrowser Library offers the first progressively interactive searching experience your users have ever encountered.” http://www.medialab.nl/?page=aquabrowserlibrary/overview
Does anyone know why the penetration of these browsers is so small in UK libraries?
damian311
Emma
Jeremy
cathqm
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Jason Rakowski
I have looked at the flash presentation and it seems quite impressive to me. I certainly think that the Guardian webiste has much improved recently and perhaps it is down to this. I am especially interested in the adaptive navigation and keen to figure out how this works.
However, I would like to look more closely at what such a package could do for a reasearch library of our size. Endeka are shooting a lot of functionality at their potential clients and this always tempts me to pull it apart and analyse all its constituents individually. There are many elements I recognize here, from what I have seen in demonstrations and seminars, that have been exploited sigualarly in UK university OPACs. For instance, in an earlier post, I metioned Dave Pattern, an OPAC developer from Huddersfield has already implemented spell correction features, inspired by old techniques used by Amazon. How he did this and at what cost would be worth invesitigating.
So firstly, pull what’s on offer at endeka apart, work out what’s useful for this library and then we can evalute it with other products or in house solutions.
This report comes highly recommended:
http://www.techsource.ala.org/ltr/next-generation-library-catalogs.html
Yes, AquaBrowser is nice, although at the moment it doesn’t seem terribly configurable. Relevance can’t be weighted according to the location of words in records (’nice idea though’) and cusdtomisation would be required to influence relevance ranking based on user ID or location.
I’m off to an AB launch at Croydon in a couple of weeks time.
I’ve found at least 1 other thingy that offers graphical navigation through tags, although I can’t remember what it is at the moment. I’ll post here (if I can remember how) if I find it again.
According to my sources, (other Sirsi library) people are also thinking about (lifted from email):
‘a) Third party commercial front-ends (e.g. Endecca, Primo, Worldcat, Local, Bibliocommons)
‘b) Open Source front end (e.g. VuFind)
‘c) Sirsi’s Next Solutions (Is there something in the works? Any sense of a release date, more importantly any sense of when it (or EPS) will be truly functional?)’
So Sirsi Next doesn’t seem to be around yet; EPS doesn’t work (and neither did the old Openly (1cate)-based Rooms).
We know about Endeca, and presumably also Primo and Worldcat. Bibliocommons (http://bibliocommons.com/), described as a library socuial networking site, people seem interested in, but unfortunately it’s home page currently isn’t terribly forthcoming.
Could something like LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com/), lib social networking, be of interest?
I just had a quick look at VuFind (http://www.vufind.org/). It appears to support COINs so I was seeing lots of QM SFX buttons everywhere; there are the (what seems to be these days) usual facets and categories; there’s some nascent exploration of tags although these didn’t seem to be working in the demo (’browse the catalogue’ at bottom); &c.
VuFind is open source; there are increasing others:
- Evergreen (http://www.open-ils.org/)
- Koha (http://www.koha.org/)
- Emilda (http://www.emilda.org/)
- Openbiblio (http://sourceforge.net/projects/obiblio/)
seem to be among the best known.
I’ll post more as I happen on it, but must dash now - train to catch!
Jeremy
Here’s an implementation of Endeca at McMaster University Library, a Horizon catalogue, courtesy Slavko Manojlovich via a Sirsi OPAC list:
http://libcat.mcmaster.ca/index.jsp?sid=1183C576597F&Tab=1
This is his additional comment:
‘What you see is the advanced search. I know I am from the old school but this doesn’t appear very advanced to me.
Indeed. I can’t tell which is Endeca or which is Horizon here either. Nonetheless I quite liked the Browse tab, which gives you search results as soon as you click on the tab. I wonder how it decides which results to present at this most general level …