All Rivers Flow to the Sea: Integrating Web-Scale Discovery with Existing Systems

Solveig* *only at St. Olaf is this a typical student name

Solveig is a typical student with typical student research problems: She has: Never used an academic library before A topic that is far too broad to write an 8 page paper on No idea what kind of supporting materials she needs Except that her prof told her to use at least 3 “scholarly sources”…what are those?

In 2003…

In 2008…

In 2011…

But Always This… http://www.stolaf.edu/library/research/articles/index.cfm

How Can we help solveig?

Progress! Created the research portal Implemented VuFind Created instruction and research guides galore Pulled research databases together by subject area and types of resources covered All excellent, except…

We still had this: http://www.stolaf.edu/library/research/articles/index.cfm

Web-Scale Discovery It was becoming clear that web-scale discovery was the way to go Our consortium leadership charged a task force with researching the options and making a recommendation: Discovery Tool Task Force 2 (DTTF2)

What is Web-Scale Discovery? Characterized by a large central index that is harvested from content producers that the vendor contracts with Contrast with federated search Everything is collected in one index, rather than sending a search out to many different sites “Google for Libraries”

Recommendation from DTTF2 We spent the 2011/12 school year on this project (a presentation in itself…) We decided to go with Summon: Largest central index Best functionality

Summon + VuFind

VuFind We implemented VuFind as our catalog overlay in the summer of 2011, and launched it for fall semester We received a lot of feedback about it Overall, we were happy with the new search capabilities and working with PALS to design a more flexible and customized catalog

Summon We purchased Summon in the summer of 2012, along with Serials Solutions’ openURL resolver and ERM DTTF2 researched other implementations of Summon, and asked the implementation group to consider two ideas:

Adding catalog records to Summon is usually problematic To provide a unified search of all our resources, consider a “channeled mash-up” approach

Summon API We were fortunate to already be using VuFind There was an existing driver for VuFind to search Summon via their API There were also numerous examples of schools using such an approach, particularly Villanova University

PALS We were equally fortunate to have a talented developer at PALS They used the existing open source code and produced a demo mashup version for us in under a week!

Implementation Thanks to PALS quick work, we were able to launch Bridge2 (as we called the new service) on January 1 for the new term at Carleton and St. Olaf

Integrating web-scale discovery

Mash-up Pros Single-search starting point is very popular with students. Within the first few weeks we were already hearing positive comments Catalog results remain visible—it’s easy to tell at a glance what you’ll see in each set… …or is it?

Mash-up Cons Consortial Summon = What goes where? How do help people understand and manage the results they see?

Next Steps Usability studies LibGuide and CONTENTdm integration Develop database recommender and “Best Bets” features Create custom search boxes for LibGuides and other sites VuFind 2.0

Most important considerations Are you and your users ready to use a system that will be constantly evolving (and improving!)? Are you ready to have your catalog (traditionally the most stable user interface we provide) as part of that system?