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tone, Graham (2010) Searching life, the universe and everything? The implementation of Summon at the University of Huddersfield. In: 39th LIBER Annual General Conference, 29 June - 2 July 2010, Aarhus University, Denmark . (Submitted)

"The Wayne State Library System launched its library mapping application in February 2010, designed to help locate materials in the five WSU libraries. The system works within the catalog to show the location of materials, as well as provides a web form for use at the reference desk. Developed using PHP and MySQL, it requires only minimal effort to update using a unique call number overlay mechanism. In addition to mapping shelved materials, the system provides information for any of the over three hundred collections held by the WSU Libraries. Patrons can do more than just locate a book on a shelf: they can learn where to locate reserve items, how to access closed collections, or get driving maps to extension center libraries. The article includes a discussion of the technology reviewed and chosen during development, an overview of the system architecture, and lessons learned during development."

"This is going to be the first of a couple of posts related to Voronoi Tessellations, Centroidal Voronoi Tessellations and Voronoi TreeMaps. In this post I'll explain what a Voronoi Tessellation is, what can it be used for, and also I'll describe an interesting algorithm for creating a Voronoi Tessellation given a set of points (or sites as I'll call them from now on)."

"Search doesn't have to be awful, but it's never going to be exactly fun to skim through tens of hundreds of supposedly "relevant" results to our query, hoping to find the ones we're looking for. We can make things better by allowing readers to quickly narrow down their search using rich facets. We can support those readers who happen to be in an exploratory mood by adding smart secondary navigation by genre, topic, location and medium. We can answer questions readers might have about a certain piece of content before they even ask them, preempting search."

"Cool search box turn your web application impressive and good search box can make it more organised and well structured. Today, I have collected 14 search boxes for your inspiration which may be implemented in your upcoming web application."

"We learned that they've turned on a new back end that greatly increases the speed of the product, with 80% of all searches being fully returned in 1 second or less. Go ahead and try it with the U of Calgary implementation. Don't like a hosted URL? Check out what the U of Virgina has done with the Summon API for their mobile interface! There's a lot of long-tail stuff out there. One of the content managers pointed out that the average academic library holds 24% of Ulrich's Core Journals, and Summon has 40%. I'm really revitalized over this project, and will be heading back to Calgary with an aim towards cleaning up our metadata in order to really leverage Summon. Lots of good stuff coming in the next few months."

"In acknowledging the Web as the platform for searching, sharing, aggregating and extending information, librarians need to familiarize themselves with the semantic web (an extension of the current web), learn new tools, techniques and trends. Most importantly for catalogers, they need to educate themselves in RDA (Resource Description and Access) which may soon replace AACR2 and MARC 21 as the new cataloging rules and standards. RDA is a set of guidelines evolved from AACR2 and is constructed on the framework of FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) and FRAD (Functional Requirements of Authority Data). The application of which is meant to direct the library catalog in providing better access to Web resources. Instead of being a display standard of library catalog using AACR2, RDA is a content standard that attempts to improve the way catalogers describe and present elements, entities and their relationships and roles in the bibliographic world. It is also the intention of RDA to make data in library catalog play a better role in the Web environment. Moreover, RDA is supposedly more flexible and adaptable in that it may be used with many encoding schema such as MODS, MARC, Dublin Core, etc."

"My primary concern relates to the management of data and the suitability of search functions to allow for academic coverage that is comprehensive without being overwhelming. For example, a basic search of the term UK Transport Policy through Summon reveals nearly 60,000 results on the University of Huddersfield's Library website. There are of course filters to help sort the data, but my first impression is that these are not particularly effective (I also find the automatic updating of the results after the selection of a single filtering item to be very frustrating). Similarly, having had a brief play around with it, I find the advanced search feature slightly confusing with regards to the search terms that it uses (this assessment must be quantified by the fact that I speak as a regular user of MetaLib, so am of course used to the nuances of that particular system). For novice users of the system then, I wonder if they might just find it all a bit too much!?"

"One of the topics of discussion at last week's Summon Advisory Board was the status of de-duping records returned by Summon. On the face of it it seems to be a simple issue - if the titles and authors match, throw the duplicate records out and you're good to go. The Summon technical team explained why it's a little harder than that though. "

"Le moteur de recherche Google lance à partir du mercredi 5 mai de nouvelles versions de sa page d'accueil et de ses pages de résultats. Principale évolution : la modification de la barre d'outils de la colonne gauche, qui inclut de nouvelles fonctionnalités et s'adaptera désormais en fonction des recherches."

"Now that we've had WCL as our main OPAC for almost a year (we started at the beginning of the fall semester in 2009), I am able to share observations and critical accounts of WorldCat Local in the context of an academic library. "

"Resource Description and Access (RDA) est le code de catalogage qui remplacera en 2010 les Règles de catalogage anglo-américaines, 2e éd. (AACR2). "

"A pilot of the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway is currently underway, which allows you to upload the metadata of your digital content to WorldCat from any OAI-compliant digital repository. (Previously, the Gateway was only integrated with CONTENTdm repositories.) Once your metadata is in WorldCat, your collections are more visible and discoverable by end users who search WorldCat.org, WorldCat Local and WorldCat Local "quick start", as well as Google, Yahoo! and other popular Web sites."

- To Fix A Leaky Sink: Envisioning The Potential of Discovery Layers - LENS: Catalog Records and Additional Data Sources in the Aquabrowser Implementation at the University of Chicago - Automated Metadata Repurposing Using eXtensible Catalog Software - Equality of Retrieval: Leveling the Metadata Playing Field in Big Indexes