Re: Help!!!!!!

[Jill Emery <Jill.Emery@mail.uh.edu>]

Hi Joe,

The October 2003 issue of the Charleston Advisor has a special metasearch
section (Vol. 5 #2, 2003). It doesn't provide the numbers you are looking
for but almost all of the reviewers included use one meta-search tool or
another. These are definitely tools that libraries are interested in and
are starting to implement. The University of Houston Libraries had III's
MetaFind up and running for a year, until last Fall when it taken down
from public view to resolve authentication issues. We're desperate to get
it back up and running because it was used heavily by our undergraduate
community. We're also committed to improving the product to be a viable
contender to Google.

For those of us not afraid of Google, meta-search tools just make good
sense but there is apprehension on behalf of librarians that we're not
indicating to users what they are searching and this is somehow wrong. In
part, the mental shift of providing article or paper level access as
opposed to a consolidate package such as a database or a journal is
something with which the profession as a whole is still grappling to
comprehend.

I cannot speak to how sales of III's MetaFind are going in terms of
numbers, but it appears this is a product that is selling and which
research libraries are implementing. You may want to contact vendors to
see if they'll provide numbers of customers who have purchased and
implemented.

Cheers,

Jill

At 06:12 PM 2/26/2004 -0500, you wrote:
>Can someone point me to a summary of the activities at research libraries
>to create meta-search engines?  I am interested in learning how extensive
>this activity is, whether the development is being done by the
>institutions themselves or by integrating third-party search tools, where
>this puts Google (and the forthcoming Longhorn) in the scheme of things,
>and what were the libraries' motivation to get involved with this
>undertaking (which I imagine to be non-trivial, as the Valley geeks say).
>
>Thank you for your help.
>
>Joe Esposito