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"Ce billet est l'émanation d'une 'synthèse bibliographique' menée dans le cadre d'un travail de groupe de : Daniel B, Pascal K, et David S. Le rapport finalisé arrive bientôt sur vos écrans…"

"Pour Marc Van Rymenant, la meilleure façon de ne pas perturber un internaute, c'est de rester dans le chemin de ce qu'il est venu faire. "Le mode d'interaction n'est pas plus important que le contenu", explique-t-il. "Il faut surtout éviter le désengagement de l'internaute". Un bémol tout de même, l'étude a été menée uniquement auprès d'étudiants, souvent extrêmement familiers avec Internet. "Les conclusions de l'étude sont à modérer", explique Marc Van Rymenant. "Il y a un décalage avec la réalité d'Internet"."

"Perhaps the world's first, we are proud to announce our upcoming Commercial Ontology (CO). What is a commercial ontology? If you asked this question you have just touched on an important distinction: fantasy versus reality. In the context of World Wide Web, the CO is the realistic version of an ontology for the reasons explained below. (...) The immediate use of the CO is related to search queries, or document characterizations, that are not tied to any advertising in conventional systems. This unrecognized domain of search queries and characterizations means loss of revenue. hakia's CO is designed to fill this gap. For example, if the search query or page characterization is "beat generation" the CO can map it to "literature" on the fly. As a result, systems using the CO will have much deeper understanding of the incoming terms, thus will be able to recognize the underlying intent beyond the face value of the words. The same capability can be used in a number of places other than advertising with the same effect. "

"Cluuz.com takes results and applies semantic processes to them. Some of the company's display options are a bit too sophisticated for my 64-year-young eyes, but I found the system quite useful. (...) The system offers other ways to view the results set. For example, you can look at hits from the search engines to which the query is passed as a traditional laundry list. Other choices include a cluster display and a Flash display which is, in my opinion, cluttered with sliders, controls, and options."\n"Cluuz technology is incorporated into Sprylogics enterprise products where it provides search and disambiguation capabilities for both internal and external data. Enterprises using Cluuz technology can do a single search for all sources of information that they have access to. The results are pulled from unstructured information from within the firewall and reconciled with the results pulled from the web, thereby forming a complete intelligence picture. This capability allows users to very effectively expand their knowledge on a topic for which they already have information internally."

"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."

"In a previous post, I discussed the different ways, one can add support to searching OPAC and other library subscribed databases. The four methods were Opensearch plugins , custom toolbars (Conduit toolbar , Google toolbar and Libx) , Smart keyword searches and Search bookmarklets"

"The Engines win by a landslide, at least according to current college students. They preferred searching on Google or Yahoo versus their college library systems, based on the attributes of: speed (90%); convenience (84%); ease of use (87%); cost-effectiveness (71%); and reliability (63%). Libraries, however, won on more trustworthy measures including credibility (77%) and accuracy (76%). While students prefer library sources, they also heavily count on the engines. Over half (53%) say the results from engines are as trustworthy as libraries. Google, Yahoo and Ask all rank about the same, without much differentiation."

"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."

"I recently received an e-mail that the next Serials Solutions/Library Journal webcast about Summon will discuss - among other things - the differences between federated search and unified discovery systems. Upon discovering this, I decided to review the entries I've written about these differences. Since the last post I wrote on this topic was written last August, it is not surprising that many of the observations I made then are now incorrect. I'd like to take this opportunity to correct some of the statements I made."

"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."

"Serial Solutions just released their database recommender feature and it is now live on our site. It currently produces a recommendation for a specific list of resources based on matched triggers, and only shows databases to which you subscribe. As they go forward, the range of what is recommended will continue to grow. Recommendations will also be triggered from a wider range of factors, including analysis of both the search terms and results set. The list of databases that are currently recommended are listed below."

"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. "