I have never used the Google Search Appliance but Google
Desktop is
capable of indexing a library's collection of metadata and
injecting
results into "regular" google searching. This
approach is greatly hampered
by the need to install Google Desktop in the first place, as
well as a
plug-in. Plus it can take about 8 hours of elapsed time for
the indexing
to occur for a million titles in an HTML format and it takes
a good amount
of compression to achieve this level of throughput [1].
Still, one of my children is in second year at my
institution and prefers
this approach to our OPAC because of sheer familiarity. A
highly tweakable
indexing solution like lucene can probably run circles
around this
approach in terms of depth and technology, but the
familiarity aspect is
also hard to ignore. The combination that might have the
most potential
based on a familiarity quotient is using sitemaps and a
google co-op setup
[2]. I think this would allow for a "see the library
catalogue in google"
type of link on the library's web page, for example.
That being said, dumping metadata records into google can
make for a
really weak searching experience. As others have suggested,
the key would
be how to leverage linking in such an environment. For
example, linking
subjects and anonymizing patron records in order to create
pages of
borrowed materials expressed as links to indicate
popularity. Our existing
systems are potentially valuable repositories of such link
information.
There have also been threads on this list about the
limitations in
utilizing Google Book Search [3]. Does a sitemap/co-op
arrangement somehow
allow a library to take advantage of the full text of
materials that
google has processed somehow? If the HTML representation of
a title from
the catalogue is somehow connected to the Google Book link,
how much
internal plumbing aligns for bringing them together in
google's own
indexing?
art
---
1. http://library
cog.uwindsor.ca/indexcat
2. http://www.google.com/coo
p/
3. http://lists.webjunction.org/wjlists/web4l
ib/2005-November/039133.html
_______________________________________________
Web4lib mailing list
Web4lib webjunction.org
http://lists.we
bjunction.org/web4lib/
|
