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LibraryFind, Terry Reese
2 Mar 07
LibraryFind
Terry Reese
Oregon State University Libraries
hybrid federated search service
Ruby on Rails application
– Rails only works with one request at a time
– in a metasearch environment, this is a problem
– clustering solution using Mongrel
– Ruby’s built in XML support not particularly good
LibraryFind
– metasearch tool: items harvested and federated (wanted to include access to IRs – built under the assumption that federated search isn’t a long-term solution, but that eventually everything will be harvested)
– openURL resolver/server
– web service
LF is a component of OSU’s vision of a library as platform
unique metasearch tool
– integrated openURL resolution
– both harvester/indexer (OAI and MARC repositories; 65 databases) and federated search too
– metadata-based knowledge base, using abstract connection classes (e.g. can create one generic connector for all Z39.50 sites, another for all web service sites, another for OAI sites, etc)
– as a result, adding new resources and sharing the knowledge base with other institutions is possible
caching
– daily cache of all searches held for 3 days
– top 15% of searches then stored to a permanent cache; considerably faster!
three search types
– general
– images (repositories)
– books and more (includes local catalogue)
To do
– scaling; current production version supports 5 simultaneous connections
– harvesting potentially 100s of millions of records; foresee as many as 20 trillion (!?!)
– umlaut integration
– opensearch
– json
– coins
– improved installation (shooting for WordPress 5 minute install)
no authentication needed to search the tool, only to connect to resources; so far, haven’t talked to any vendors who have a problem with that
Posted by pzed on March 2, 2007 at 10.46am
Categories: code4lib 2007, conferences, libraries
