Week 8 Access in Digital Libraries: Part

Chapter 1. Definition and Origins of OAI-PMH. (Available in CourseWeb)

 Todd Miller, Federated Searching: Put It in Its Place . April 15, 2004. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA406012.html&

 Proposing a relationship between federated search engines and library catalogs:

If the catalog is the primary source of information, then access federated searches through the catalog?

Available content is not limited to data stored within the physical library. The content demanded by users is often not cataloged by libraries. Viewing the catalog as the primary source of data does not reflect the current library. Today's libraries are vast information centers, providing books and other cataloged material is only one aspect of the modern library.

 

“Knowledge is power”, true for the patron & for the library. The libraries enable and engage their information, the more central they become in the lives of their constituency.

 

U.S. Senator Wendell Ford said, "If information is the currency of democracy, then libraries are the banks." Libraries have been made too secure. Google has shown that the most powerful information access approach also happens to be the simplest and easiest. “The most complex and least intuitive interfaces wind up securing information, not facilitating information access.”

 

The Truth About Federated Searching. October 2003. http://www.infotoday.com/it/oct03/hane1.shtml

 

Not all federated search engines can search all databases, most can search Z39.50 and free databases. Federated search engines cannot search all licensed databases for both walk-up and remote users. Why? Authentication: difficult to manage for subscription databases, especially for remote users.

 

True de-duplication is not possible.

Relevancy ranking are never totally relevant.

Subscribing rather than having a federated engine as software is the best option, due to updates and labor intensiveness of the IT issues. Leave it up to the engine database developers.

 

A federated search translates a search into something the native database's engine can understand. It's restricted to the capabilities of the native database's search function. A federated search can't can’t go beyond the parameters set by the native database engine.

 

Lynch, Clifford A. (1997).  The Z39.50 Information Retrieval Standard, Part 1: A Strategic View of its Past, Present, and Future.  D-Lib Magazine, April 1997. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april97/04lynch.html

 

I’ve been dying all these years for a succinct definition for Z39.50 and I finally have it: “ Z39.50 -- properly "Information Retrieval (Z39.50); Application Service Definition and Protocol Specification, ANSI/NISO Z39.50-1995" -- is a protocol which specifies data structures and interchange rules that allow a client machine (called an "origin" in the standard) to search databases on a server machine (called a "target" in the standard) and retrieve records that are identified as a result of such a search.

 

The rather forbidding name "Z39.50" comes from the fact that the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)-accredited standards development organization serving libraries, publishing and information services, was once the Z39 committee of ANSI. NISO standards are numbered sequentially and Z39.50 is the fiftieth standard developed by NISO. The current version of Z39.50 was adopted in 1995, thus superseding earlier versions adopted in 1992 and 1988. It is sometimes referred to as Z39.50 Version 3.“

 

The article is the first part of a 2-part story on the history and implementation of Z39.5 protocol.  Article deals primarily with Z39.5 and its use in digital libraries.

 

Norbert Lossau, “Search Engine Technology and Digital Libraries: Libraries Need to Discover the Academic Internet” D-Lib Magazine, June 2004, Volume 10 Number 6. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june04/lossau/06lossau.html

 

Librarians should not only look to Google and Yahoo but rather other search engines with the means of searching into the “Deep Web” as discussed in last weeks class.  I think this is a big conundrum in all areas of IS and LIS.  Ignorance or a laziness of skimming the Web rather than exploring the Web. Finding those sites and e-documents that can be pulled from beneath the levels normally searched by the larger engines.  I’ve find many an important document with newer engines like Hakia that report to be semantic, but offer a far better advantage, it contains sites pooled and suggested manually by IT and LIS experts and amateurs.

 

Question:  Has there been current research done on semantic engines like Hakia?  I haven’t seen any news pertaining to the idea.  Perhaps I’m not looking “deep” enough?”