Re: Primo Central without Primo

On 8/31/2011 2:58 PM, Paoshan Yue wrote:
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> So does this mean that, for a library without Primo to take advantage of Primo Central Index, the library will need to pre-harvest content (catalog, digital collections, IR, etc.) and merge results with those from Primo Central?  Doesn't it seem a lot of work?

A probably infeasible amount of work with less than satisfactory 
results--merging results from two different search engines at 
display-time is basically the traditional "broadcast federated search", 
and generally works not well at all. (And if you do want to do this, you 
could alternately buy Metalib, which comes with access to 
PrimoCentral-without-Primo, and is a broadcast federated search tool).

But there are ways to use an aggregated index like Primo Central without 
merging result sets at all.

You could simply search PrimoCentral as it is, as an aggregated article 
index, like Google Scholar or Scopus. (Perhaps it performs better in 
some way than the alternatives).

Or could provide a search which gave PrimoCentral results and results 
from one or more other search engines side-by-side ("bento box style") 
instead of merged. 
http://bibwild.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/article-search-and-catalog-search/



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> Cheers,
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> Paoshan
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> -----Original Message-----
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> From:  David Friggens<[log in to unmask]<https://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?LOGON=A2%3Dind1103%26L%3DNGC4LIB%26D%3D0%26P%3D49289&Y=yue%40UNR.EDU>>
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> Subj:  Re: [NGC4LIB] The next generation of discovery tools (new LJ article)
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> Date:  Mon Mar 28, 2011 6.55 pm
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> Size:  1000 bytes
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> To:  [log in to unmask]<https://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?LOGON=A2%3Dind1103%26L%3DNGC4LIB%26D%3D0%26P%3D49289&Y=yue%40UNR.EDU>
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>> So, going back to the original topic of this thread.
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> :-)  [I've been finding the side thread on ranking to be very
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> interesting and illuminating]
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> To add my two cents, I've found it interesting and a little surprising
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> to see that people are taking on the task of merging catalogue and
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> "discovery index" data themselves.
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> My institution/consortium chose Summon, and I've been quite glad that
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> they take on that work of merging our catalogue and repository results
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> along with their index. We're currently using their default interface,
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> but I'm open to using another interface to display the search/results
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> via the API.
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> I can understand that if you bought Primo Central without Primo you
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> would need to do result merging yourself, but at least with Summon and
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> EDS I would have thought it much easier and preferable to use the
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> combined results that those services provide in an alternative
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> interface.
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> Are people expecting that they can do much better by combining the
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> results themselves?
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> Cheers
> David
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