On Dec 22, 2009, at 4:08 PM, Custer, Mark wrote:
> I'm curious if anyone on the list has experience with adding their EAD documents into a larger discovery system?
> * University of Chicago library's implementation of AquaBrowser seems to index entire EAD documents.
>
> Example (in which I've searched for "American Automobile Brief History", quotes included, and where the first 3 results returned should be for archival finding aids):
> http://lens.lib.uchicago.edu/?q=%22american%20automobile%20brief%20history%22
We index just about everything in the EAD. I can give details if it's useful.
> So, this leads me to three questions in particular:
[snip]
> 2. For those of you that are including the entire EAD in your library's discovery tool, did you already have surrogate MARC records for those collections in your catalog? If so, how are you dealing with those now that you're adding the EAD?
Yes, and at the moment we are leaving the surrogate records in place.
> 3. What do you think of whole retrieval experience (advanced search options, facets, incorporation into the relevancy algorithm, etc.)?
Seems to work pretty well. AquaBrowser can ingest the EAD directly as XML files. We use LC vocabularies in our EADs, so they play nice with the MARC records on that level. The granularity of EAD and MARC is not identical, which leads to decisions like whether to index a value in persname as an author, a subject, or both.
The EADs are certainly more rich than our MARC surrogate records, and they generally come out with higher ranking than the MARC surrogates. You can see this in a search for «enrico fermi papers»:
http://lens.lib.uchicago.edu/?q=enrico+fermi+papers
In part this is because our ranking is tuned to weigh titles heavily. The MARC surrogates have rather anemic titles like "Papers, 1910-1954 (inclusive), 1942-1954 (bulk)", where the EADs will have a more descriptive top-level unittitle like "Fermi, Enrico. Papers."
Rather than giving users a full view of an EAD in Lens, EADs in a result set link directly out to our EAD interface, so the user can go directly to the EAD it its preferred interface.
I should also say that the goal is not necessarily for Lens be the primary discovery tool for EADs (or other silos) but to allow people who are otherwise unaware of such materials to encounter them.
-Tod
Tod Olson <tod_at_uchicago.edu>
Systems Librarian
University of Chicago Library
Received on Wed Dec 23 2009 - 10:28:47 EST