> Are people expecting that they can do much better by combining the
> results themselves?
Villanova's decision to keep local holdings out of Summon and present two lists separately in our VuFind instance was influenced by the sense that searching for book-like items in our physical location and article-like items in our electronic holdings were two distinct tasks, and merging them into a single list would potentially bury useful results in a sea of noise. Providing two side-by-side lists gives the user all of the options at a glance while also making it clear that they can hone in on one type of search or the other. We also wanted to retain the benefits of custom relevance ranking in our local VuFind index, since the ranking of the Summon results was unsatisfactory at the time we began using it (things have improved significantly since then).
Obviously, this decision will have to be frequently revisited -- physical collections are very much in transition, so the physical/electronic distinction becomes less meaningful over time. Improvements to Summon (such as the HathiTrust full text search announced today) may also add some functionality that we can't replicate locally and may have to be weighed against the local advantages that are lost by switching to the hosted index. It's definitely not a stable playing field!
- Demian
Received on Tue Mar 29 2011 - 09:47:59 EDT