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"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."

""In this current phase of library automation, all eyes are focused on developing and deploying Web-based interfaces better suited to meet the expectations of the current generation of Web-savvy users," notes Marshall Breeding in the "Introduction" to "Next-Generation Library Catalogs," the fourth issue of Library Technology Reports in 2007. "Over the course of the last year, a number of libraries have made bold moves to introduce new catalogs cast in a mold apart from their previous offerings. Library automation vendors have launched development efforts to create new catalogs and interfaces more in tune with today's expectations," Breeding adds. In this issue of LTR, Breeding covers the terminology associated with the "next-generation" catalog situation as well as such areas as: * federated searching and * other features expected in the "next-generation" interfaces (such as faceted navigation, relevancy, the "did you mean?" feature, and RSS)."

"A simple componentised framework constructed in Javascript to enable the sharing of Ajax Style extensions to a web interface. Although the drive for this is rooted in Library OPAC interfaces, the framework is applicable to any environment which, via identifiers contained within a html page, needs to link to or embed external resources. "

"Web Search engines most often operate on the idea that their tools are supposed to represent the fastest way between a user's search query and a site that will represent a fitting information content to satisfy a "information need". The main challenge is therefore about building ranking algorithms that will find the "best" site and put it into first place. While this approach has been highly successful it also neglects the user's ability to interact, select, navigate, analyze - in short, to be an active agent and a stakeholder in the search process. Our proposal is the technical manifestation of a simple concept: instead of reducing the search phase to a minimum we believe that there is much to be gained by presenting a semantically rich interface to users; this interface can be used to either navigate in a list of results (1000 in the case of our current prototype) or to refine the search query. The "termcloud" and "cluster" views give a quick overview of a topic by showing which terms are significant, their relative frequency and the relations that exist between them. This way the user gets an idea of the topic before even visiting a Web site from the result list. We hope that this approach will help users in digging deeper than the first couple of results and explore the regions of the Web that might not be so easy to find with a regular, hit-driven search engine."

"The software powering Open Library is centered around a flexible templating system that enables anyone to have control over the organization of their information display. It is designed to be simple to use, to encourage participation, yet powerfully modular through the application of macros and principles of networked interface. In this document, we will review existing technologies, explain concepts, present a framework for discussion and outline a plan to meet those goals for a full site launch in October 2009."

"The goal of this study is to expand our understanding of the relationships between selected tasks, cognitive abilities and search result interfaces. The underlying objective is to understand how to select search results presentation for tasks and user contexts"

"The following are some of the Discovery Layer Interfaces that have been selected by libraries."

"The Google Search Appliance XHTML Stylesheet defines a user interface for your Google Search Appliance that conforms to modern web standards including XHTML 1.0 Strict, XHTML Mobile Profile (XHTML-MP) and CSS 2.1. It generates well-formed, valid markup and is accessible in a variety of browsers and presentation modes. "

"In 2007-2008, the DLF convened a Task Group to recommend standard interfaces for integrating the data and services of the Integrated Library System (ILS) with new applications supporting user discovery. This page gives access to the group's recommendation, related materials, and information on followup activities."

"The following are some of the Discovery Layer Interfaces that have been selected by libraries."

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.

Google Image Swirl organizes image search results into groups and sub-groups, based on their visual and semantic similarity and presents them in an intuitive exploratory interface.

"Three hosted federated search tools, Follett One Search, Gale PowerSearch Plus, and WebFeat Express, were configured and implemented in a school library. Databases from five vendors and the OPAC were systematically searched. Federated search results were compared with each other and to the results of the same searches in the database's native interface to disclose differences in handling query syntax, searching, retrieval, browsing results, etc. Each product was easily configured, but none were capable of searching every database desired. Simpler Boolean queries are the most successful queries because of the underlying structure and differences of the databases, and the capabilities of certain products. Federated search products succeed in simplifying access to multiple database resources at school, but searching remains different from the familiar Web search engines in many ways. To become more Google-like, federated searching must be done against indexes built in advance instead of the current real-time searching method."

"Les interfaces graphiques de recherche relèvent presque toutes d'un modèle unique et primaire : un champ de saisie uniligne et un bouton permettant de valider la requête saisie dans le champ. Face à la diversité des individus et de leurs besoins en informations, de nombreuses techniques de visualisation et d'interaction innovantes ont émergés ces dix dernières années. Pourtant ces innovations sont rarement utilisées et le but de cet article est de faire le point sur l'état de l'art des techniques de visualisation et d'interaction qui peuvent être pertinentes pour la recherche d'information."

"interface de restitution graphique des résultats proposés par Exalead lors d'une requête. Au lieu de vous restituer une liste d'URL comme dans un moteur de recherche classique, Constellation réorganise donc les résultats proposés en fonction des liens qu'ils entretiennent entre eux (échange de liens, thématiques proches, ...)"

"Le concept des Swickis, plus ancien que les outils vus précédemment, est identique à celui de ses principaux concurrents avec une interface permettant de créer de façon très complète son propre moteur de recherche vertical (voir encadré page 14). A noter que, en mode simple en mode avancé chez Eurekster, les possibilités de configuration sont excellentes : liste d'url à inclure ou à exclure, thématiques générales, mots clés, filtre sur les contenus adultes, recherches multimédia, ajout de nuages de requêtes, etc. La technologie de recherche utilisée est celle de Yahoo! (Yahoo! Search Technology)."

"L'inspiration Machine utilise des interfaces de programmation Web, telles que celles utilisées sous Flickr, YouTube, eBay afin d'organiser les résultats de la recherche en fonction de leur créativité dans le navigateur de l'utilisateur en utilisant des technologies Rich Internet."

"The Web puzzle of online information resources often hinders end-users from effective and efficient access to these resources. Clustering resources into appropriate subject-based groupings may help alleviate these difficulties, but will it work with heterogeneous material? The University of Michigan and the University of California Irvine joined forces to test automatically enhancing metadata records using the Topic Modeling algorithm on the varied OAIster corpus. We created labels for the resulting clusters of metadata records, matched the clusters to an in-house classification system, and developed a prototype that would showcase methods for search and retrieval using the enhanced records. Results indicated that while the algorithm was somewhat time-intensive to run and using a local classification scheme had its drawbacks, precise clustering of records was achieved and the prototype interface proved that faceted classification could be powerful in helping end-users find resources. "

"Not all library content can be exposed as HTML pages for harvesting by search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. If a library instead exposes its content through a local search interface, that content can then be found by users of metasearch engines such as A9 and Vivísimo. The functionality provided by the local search engine will affect the functionality of the metasearch engine and the findability of the library's content. This paper describes that situation and some emerging standards in the metasearch arena that choose different balance points between functionality and ease of implementation. "

"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."