Group items tagged

"In addition to Discovery products created by commercial companies, a number of alternatives have emerged in the open source arena. These open source products allow libraries to follow a more experimental approach in establishing their nextgeneration discovery interface strategy. Libraries can download and install the software on a test server, load sample data sets, and customize it without the need to make a major commitment or financial outlay. They can even experiment with multiple products. Theavailability of these open source products allows a library to make an initial investigation of a new generation interface and gain hands-on experience, even if they might eventually decide to purchase a commercial product. In the open source discovery interface arena, VUfind stands as the dominant product. The Mellon-funded eXtensible Catalog project has been underway for about 2 years and will soon be releasing software. Other open source discovery technologies emerging include the University of Virginia's Blacklight and OpenBib, which is an example of discovery interfaces developed internationally."

"MasterKey is a growing and evolving family of tools for building sophisticated information discovery solutions. They can be used individually, or they can be combined together using a shared service-based architecture. Some of the tools have been released by Index Data under OSS (open source software) licenses, whereas others, at this time, are made available exclusively to our customers. To complement the software, Index Data offers a full range of support, consulting, and development services. For businesses, our components are flexible and modular enough to fit into practically any existing software platform. For consortia and larger libraries, we offer an opportunity to create a solution which is uniquely adapted to local needs, while also based on open software components and open standards."

"Jumper 2.0 is a revolution in enterprise search. One that delivers personalized, specialized, and trusted search directly to the knowledge workers who need it most. Jumper is light-weight, web-based, license-free, and quickly deployed to smaller groups of users. Easily customized and adaptable it meets the unique needs of departments and divisions, research groups and project teams. Making it a point solution search approach that is highly flexible and very dynamic. Jumper 2.0 is commercial open source software for universal search and knowledge management powered by an enterprise bookmarking engine. Jumper uses peer and social-networking principles to tag and link distributed content, media, or data regardless of format or location - including databases, flat files, fileshares, content systems, blogs and wikis, even people - through one simple search box."

" VuFind is a library resource portal designed and developed for libraries by libraries. The goal of VuFind is to enable your users to search and browse through all of your library's resources by replacing the traditional OPAC to include: * Catalog Records * Locally Cached Journals * Digital Library Items * Institutional Repository * Institutional Bibliography * Other Library Collections and Resources VuFind is completely modular so you can implement just the basic system, or all of the components. And since it's open source, you can modify the modules to best fit your need or you can add new modules to extend your resource offerings. VuFind has many APIs to interact with the search, data and many other features. You can syndicate your record data with other institutions via an OAI server. You can search using vufind's algorithms via OpenSearch. And if you want complete access to your indexed data, you can interact with Solr, VuFind's backend search and index engine."

"With support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a multinational group of libraries is developing the design for an Open Library Environment (OLE), an alternative to the current model of an Integrated Library System. The goal is to produce a design document to inform open source library system development efforts, to guide future library system implementations, and to influence current Integrated Library System vendor products."

This article will explore the space between Summon's out-of-the-box user interface and full developer API, providing practical advice on tweaking configuration information and catalog exports to take full advantage of Summon's indexing and faceting features. The article then describes the creation of OSUL's home-grown open source availability service which replaced and enhanced the availability information that Summon would normally pull directly from the catalog.

"Next-generation library catalogs have been getting good press for some time now. While uptake of these search tools has increased over the last year, next-gen OPACs are by no means ubiquitous yet. While the market continues to evolve, the marketplace for these products has matured significantly, with a fairly wide range of products available, both commercial and open source."

"Metasearch, parallel search, federated search, broadcast search, cross-database search, search portal are a familiar part of the information community's vocabulary. They speak to the need for search and retrieval to span multiple databases, sources, platforms, protocols, and vendors at one time. Metasearch services rely on a variety of approaches to search and retrieval including open standards (such as NISO's Z39.50), proprietary API's, and screen scraping. However, the absence of widely supported standards, best practices, and tools makes the metasearch environment less efficient for the system provider, the content provider, and ultimately the end-user. "

"For more than 15 years, Index Data has built technologies and solutions in support of searching. Our customers and partners include national libraries and consortia, government agencies, and commercial companies. Our business is to seek out the most challenging problems in the area of metasearching and large-scale content indexing and searching, and to engineer industrial-strength tools to help people solve those problems. We have been active participants in and contributors to the international standards communities in our field since the very beginning. Our open-source protocol implementations are the most widely used in the industry and have had significant impact on both the evolution and penetration of international standards like Z39.50 and SRU. Because of our long history in this area, and our focus on building flexible, reusable tools for developers and organizations, our partners can focus their attention on adding value and on creating compelling user experiences. "

"Koha utilise le moteur d'indexation open-source Zebra. Le site http://www.indexdata.dk/zebra/ présente Zébra comme : "un outil hautement performant permettant d'indexer et de rechercher du texte structuré. Il est capable de lire les enregistrements dans différents formats d'entrée (par exemple email, XML, MARC) et donne accès aux données grâce à l'utilisation d'équations de recherches booléennes et de requêtes en texte libre. Zebra supporte de grosses bases de données ( dizaines de millions d'enregistrements, dizaines de gigabytes). Il permet la mise à jour incrémentale de la base de données sur des systèmes en production. Du fait que Zebra support le protocole de recherche Z39.50, vous pouvez rechercher dans les bases de données Zebra par l'intermédiaire d'une grande variété de programmes et outils, commerciaux ou libres, qui sont capables de communiquer via ce protocole." (traduit du Zebra - User-s Guide and Reference, p3, http://www.indexdata.dk/zebra/doc/zebra.pdf)."

"Charge: - Explore metasearch services on the marketplace, including open source services. - Bring in vendors to demonstrate services. - Identify sites using these services. - Document comparisons, including functionality, what is needed to set up, what level staff to implement, cost differences, strengths and weakness. How would the service work with Collection Search Center? SIRIS? - Make recommendations for what and how to implement."

"It is interesting that Summon is built using an open-source product architecture - and ditching the need for a federated search back-end is quite a radical step forward into the cloud. I'm wondering if this is related to their different approach to authentication: both Summon and Metalib seem to be 'authentication agnostic' and could work with a variety of authentication systems: but ExLibris seems to prefer the 'up-front' password challenge as opposed to Serials Solutions who give you it the other way round: metadata first and only authenticate later. Is it harder to integrate authentication, as opposed to searching for content, into an institutional login this way round? I don't yet know as I think it depends what choices we make on identity management. Personally I'm drawn to the 'up-front' approach - even though the simplicity of what Serials Solutions are doing is very attractive, I prefer my password challenges at the beginning - rather than at the end of the process. What about others?"

"The report covers the following: * What is federated search? * Conducting a needs assessment * Defining purchase criteria * Building your team * Industry research * Proprietary or open source? * Narrowing the field * Conducting product tests * Selecting and implementing your choice * Measuring results The following activities are included in the Federated Search Report and Tool Kit: 1. Needs Assessment 2. Create a Story About Using Federated Search 3. Staff Requirements Assessment 4. Purchase Criteria Definition 5. The Insource/Outsource Dilemma 6. Assembling Your Team 7. Product and Company Overviews 8. Product Trials 9. Analysis and Product Selection 10. Review and Evaluation "

"LibX is an open source browser extension for Firefox and Internet Explorer that provides access to your library's resources. Designed originally as a Firefox extension, version 1.0 of the LibX extension for Internet Explorer is available as of December 2008 (for those of you at Internet Explorer but not Firefox friendly institutions....or maybe that's just us!). "

* Blacklight * Evergreen * Kochief * Koha * Scriblio * SOPAC * VuFind