David,
You ask a great question. Why should libraries spend time developing their own user interfaces? The Summon, EDS and Primo interfaces are very good. My answer is cost and flexibility. All of my experience has been with consortium, I'm pretty sure this doesn't hold true for all individual libraries. I believe that (at least in the two consortium I've worked for) that locally controlled code (whether home grown or open source) costs less. I acknowledge that other people have different experiences.
As for flexibility what better place to maintain flexibility than in the development of the user interface? We can respond to changes, new opportunities and user desires very quickly. We can integrate services into individual campus environments as well. The discussion on this list and on the Code4lib listserv reveals so many great ideas for expanding the usefulness of the catalog/discovery tool. For example, I can't wait to see the application of linked data sources to our user interfaces. We are in a period of transition (as we always are) and we don't know where these user interfaces are going to be in 5, 10, 15 years. In the mean time we got 1.46 million hits in Mango last month and we want to improve those user experiences. Of course the goal is to deliver relevant resources to our users. Adding articles is probably the biggest development since ... online catalogs? We don't know exactly the best way to present the options to users, but we are eager to try different ideas.
Sorry for the long answer. We've been thinking a lot about the impact of this change.
Jean
On Mar 28, 2011, at 6:55 PM, David Friggens wrote:
> So, going back to the original topic of this thread.
:-) [I've been finding the side thread on ranking to be very
interesting and illuminating]
To add my two cents, I've found it interesting and a little surprising
to see that people are taking on the task of merging catalogue and
"discovery index" data themselves.
My institution/consortium chose Summon, and I've been quite glad that
they take on that work of merging our catalogue and repository results
along with their index. We're currently using their default interface,
but I'm open to using another interface to display the search/results
via the API.
I can understand that if you bought Primo Central without Primo you
would need to do result merging yourself, but at least with Summon and
EDS I would have thought it much easier and preferable to use the
combined results that those services provide in an alternative
interface.
Are people expecting that they can do much better by combining the
results themselves?
Cheers
David
Jean Phillips
Manager, Aleph Services
Florida Center for Library Automation
jeanp_at_ufl.edu
Received on Tue Apr 05 2011 - 09:45:54 EDT