Gilad,
Thanks for providing this overview. I'm aware of these methods. I guess what
bugs me is that many libraries aren't yet doing this, and I think it's
largely because it's very challenging to do, and it's difficult to
demonstrate return on investment to library directors and other
administrators. Also, in the current budget climate, coming up with
thousands of dollars per year to fund subscriptions to valuable services
like SerialsSolutions products, Primo, etc. makes it an even harder sell,
despite the fact that it's highly inefficient, if not impossible, for
individual libraries to aggregate sufficient metadata to expose the majority
of the resources they own, license, etc. and provide links via link resolver
services, which require yet more investment in system infrastructure and
metadata management.
I have ideas about what I'd like the final product to look like: search
results from a mainstream search engine that match up with library
availability and access metadata in a seamless way. I'm not sure about the
extent to which the mainstream search engines currently provide a technical
infrastructure to support this. I'm also incredibly confused about what
roles the various library "discovery" systems/products/tools can play, and
what combination of these (if any) would enable libraries to expose their
content most effectively for the least amount of money.
My bottom line is that libraries really need to push the metadata they have
regarding availability and access to content out to where the users are.
Primo, Summon, WorldCat, OpenURL resolvers, etc. are all valuable and
important, but they still don't seem to be enough.
Shirley
On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 2:27 AM, Gilad Gal <Gilad.Gal_at_exlibrisgroup.com>wrote:
> Shirley,
>
> I think what you mean is to enable users to search for your library's
> material through Google. We do this with Primo.
>
> Search engines (like Primo) create a normalized format of all the local
> material, which is very beneficial for discovery, because you prepare
> exactly the information you want to expose (we have a whole publishing
> platform intended for this). On the other hand, search engines create
> the pages (SERPs) dynamically upon request, which makes it impossible
> for crawlers (like Google's crawlers) to index the material.
>
> The solution is a standard named 'Sitemap' (sometimes refered to as
> 'Google Sitemap', but all major search engines use it), which provides
> the crawler with the list of relevant URLs. Primo supports this standard
> and allows libraries to publish their material to web search engines.
>
> The result is that when using Primo you can expose your library's
> material to end users through web search engines. In that way, a user
> can search in Google for a book title, include the library's name in the
> search string, and get the item in the library as a result. It is also
> useful for exposing unique collections the library may have that do not
> exist elsewhere on the web and for that reason will appear high on
> Google's result list.
>
> Best regards,
> Gilad
>
Received on Thu Sep 02 2010 - 15:20:05 EDT