>
>'Something that should be emphasized in this discussion is the OPAC
vendors' role. They have the
> ability to massively improve the situation by adopting best practices
and implementing standards-based
> solutions that are accessible easy to integrate.'
Backend standards are not necessarily a prerequisite to making at least
some progress on this kind of thing. I cobbled together a quick
javascript experiment a couple of years back to produce a one stop
portal to a range of online databases. Unlike the Google Coop approach,
this provides access to "deep web" backend data. It probably overlaps
with some of the things that the MSF are trying to do.
You might like a play with:
http://www.hmag.gla.ac.uk/john/INCA/Xsearch_arch.htm
Works best in Firefox, where you get a new tab for each results set. As
a prototype it probably doesn't do much in terms of standards, and it's
probably quite easy to break just now, but it does kind of work. I was
able to add quite a range of completely different databases in only a
few minutes each. As it's all Javascript, you can look at the source to
see what it's doing.
Due to other commitments, I've not had any time to pursue this further,
but it's quite easy to see a number of ways this could easily be made
much more usable and generalised. In principle all that is needed for
this is the ability to pass search terms to backends via GET (athough
even POSTs could be emulated), and standard descriptors for each site
allowing some translation of different search syntaxes, and ways of
handling null returns, and record counts to be defined. By doing the
processing backend, and parsing each returned dataset before sending
summary info (eg "x hits from this site" y hits from this site") from
each page, I think it would be quite easy to make a configurable tool to
provide access to smallish groups of online catalogues (eg regional or
national museum clusters). I've got some more detailed proposals and
descriptions somewhere...
Anybody interested?
Cheers
John
Dr JW Faithfull
Curator of Mineralogy and Petrology
Hunterian Museum
University of Glasgow
G12 8QQ
Tel: 0141 330 4213
Fax: 0141 330 8001
Email: [log in to unmask]
Online catalogue: http://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
James Watson
Sent: 14 June 2007 12:08
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Integration of Museum brochureware site & searchable online
collections
'Something that should be emphasized in this discussion is the OPAC
vendors' role. They have the ability to massively improve the situation
by adopting best practices and implementing standards-based solutions
that are accessible easy to integrate.'
I agree with Danny here. We were discussing integration, transparency,
visibility to search engines and the whole thing with a large library
system (including opac) vendor earlier this year, and were basically
stonewalled. They were totally amazed when we asked for persistent
durable URL's for the catalogue records.
It's a sad truth that functionality of vendor-supplied opacs have moved
on very little since they were launched in the mainstream in the 1980s.
Perhaps this would be an opportunity for united advocacy towards the
system vendors? Perhaps something for the MLA or MDA?
Once again, this is an area where the digital library guys are well
ahead of us (Google: Opacs suck).
Re: Google searches for museum collections, as Jim O'Donnell said on an
earlier post, we set something up last year in-house to search our
collections, and there's also this:
http://www.museumcollections.org.uk/mc/index.asp which will, I'm sure,
be familiar to list subscribers. There's certainly potential there.
Cheers
James
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
James Watson
Digital Collections Manager
Digital Media Team
National Maritime Museum
Greenwich
London
SE10 9NF
[log in to unmask]
020 8312 8506
http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Danny Hope
Sent: 14 June 2007 11:12
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Integration of Museum brochureware site & searchable online
collections
On 6/13/07, David Ellis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> The Museum Software Foundation (MSF) have been working on a Federated
> Search project
> http://museumsoftwarefoundation.org/cb/sharedProjectInfo.do?proj_id=8.
We
> have been using google style search techniques to index databases
directly,
> and provide extremely fast retrieval rates. The technology we are
using
> scales to billions of records and makes building search infrastructure
very
> easy.
Inspired by this, I've setup an aggregated museum search in Google Coop:
http://tinyurl.com/28c7xl
Right now it searches across 10-20 museums. If you volunteer, you can
add more sites to the list.
This would be much more powerful if OPAC vendors would do a better job
when it comes to accessibility.
Something that should be emphasized in this discussion is the OPAC
vendors' role. They have the ability to massively improve the situation
by adopting best practices and implementing standards-based solutions
that are accessible easy to integrate.
--
Regards,
Danny Hope
http://hobointernet.com
+44 (0)845 230 3760
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