RE: Help!!!!!!

["Hamaker, Chuck" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>]

Joe: An excellent article on the why libraries are looking at this is one
by a group of librarians at the University of Rochester who have spent
much of the last year working on implementing and enhancing Endeavor's
Encompass implementation of MuseGlobal. See: Advisor Reports from the
Field: Serial Failure:

>http://www.charlestonco.com/features.cfm?id=146&type=fr>
Published in Volume 5, Number 3, January 2004 

Here's the first paragraph:

"Try this simple test in your library: take four random students, sit them
one at a time at a computer with your library's Web site on the screen,
and then ask each student to find a newspaper article on affirmative
action. There is no substitute for actually watching the "serial failure"
that ensues-it is vivid, humbling, and sometimes breathtaking in scope. Of
course, the failure in question does not fall to the students themselves:
serial failure is rather the failure of academic libraries to facilitate
students' access to articles, and it is without a doubt the most important
access-related problem in academic librarianship. The sheer cost of
journal scholarship is reason enough to merit concerted action to address
serial failure. But in a world that offers students powerful internet
searching at every turn, we consider serial failure to be a survival issue
for academic libraries-one vitally important to maintaining and developing
the relevance of the library to the academic lives of students."

George Machovec reviews briefly why TCA with Jill Emery's help took up
this issue at:

Metasearch Interfaces for Libraries George S. Machovec (The Charleston
Advisor) george@coalliance.org
<http://www.charlestonco.com/features.cfm?id=137&type=me>

Jill's editorial on the reviews she coordinated is:
It's a Meta, Meta, Meta World
<http://www.charlestonco.com/features.cfm?id=136&type=np>

And see David Lindahl and Stanley Wilder
Brave New MetaSearch
<http://www.charlestonco.com/features.cfm?id=139&type=np>

Meta Search Engines -- The Librarians' Answer to Google? 
by Judy Luther 
<http://www.charlestonco.com/features.cfm?id=123&type=np>
or
Trumping Google? Metasearching's Promise. Library Journal
By Judy Luther -- 10/1/2003
<http://www.libraryjournal.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA322627&pu
blication=libraryjournal>

"Metasearch promises to give patrons one-stop access to the many and various
resources at the heart of the library digital collection"

you can see some of the engines yourself if you look around:
See the  University of Hong Kong,libraries and click on their metasearch
link from their homepage:

<http://lib.hku.hk/>

seems to be open for searching from the web --don't know if that's
intentional or not, but its a good way to see one in action. (you have to
accept their certificate and I cancelled the CJK download-to get the
english language version)

There are  many specialized metasearch systems on the web produced by
libraries or consortia.

Look at MALVINE: "MALVINE, an online search service for post-medieval
manuscripts hosted by the Berlin State Library and maintained by a
European consortium of libraries, archives, and museums. "
<http://www.malvine.org/>

Or the enormous German produced and supported resource Karlsruher
Virtueller Katalog.  The KVK is an amazing "meta-catalog" for simultaneous
searching of literally hundreds of library catalogs.  
<http://www.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/kvk.html>

Or the British Libraries COPAC which has become the standard for searching
UK libraries holdings:-though it is I believe- a shared database approach.  
"COPAC� is a union catalogue. It provides FREE access to the merged online
catalogues of 24 of the largest university research libraries in the UK
and Ireland PLUS the British Library & the National Library of Scotland."
<http://www.copac.ac.uk/copac/>

There are many many special purpose metasearch portals being developed and
implemented in libraries world-wide. I keep finding them, -seems like
daily.

Clients for the commercial metasearch products by now number in the many
thousands.(WebFeat claims over 900 customers alone), - see Judy Luther's
article above for a list of some of the major products.

Chuck Hamaker

-----Original Message-----
From: Joseph J. Esposito [mailto:espositoj@worldnet.att.net] 
Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2004 5:13 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Help!!!!!!

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