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#access2009pei – Bess Sadler and Jon Jiras – Next Gen OPACs – part 1
2 Oct 09
Bess Sadler, U Virginia
Blacklight: Findability for your whole collection
Blacklight is a discovery layer, about creating a great user interface, increase serendipity: Dan Rubin “If your interface requires instructions, it needs to be redesigned”
Lack of relevance ranking, lack of permanent URLs, no RSS, siloing of collections, lack of object type appropriate behaviours (e.g. of DVD which doesn’t have an author), inability to respond to user requests and suggestions; these things are broken and we need to fix them ourselves.
One problem Blacklight is trying to solve is the variety of different siloed data sources: catalogue, IR, dissertations, Google books project, local digitization projects, licensed journals and databases, etc.
Solr is the anti-silo. Easy to use: download it tonight! Indexing is under our control, adding a new collection is as simple as adding a new xml output. We determine how to index our own data. E.g. of music collection, meticulously catalogued; number one reference question: flute/violin duets? Hasn’t been in our power to define indexing in order to answer that question. Can have different metadata profiles for different kinds of objects.
But how do you get good results? Because we index it ourselves, we have control over our relevance algorithms. In practice, a testing language called Cucumber which plugs in to Ruby. Looks like English. Can further resolve conflicts by developing lightweight interfaces for specific user groups. E.g. music people get a difference relevance algorithm: most relevant thing is rarely an exact title match.
Solr, Ruby on Rails; plugin structure allows for local customizations without forking.
Data should be stable, enduring; applications should be kept lightweight. Control of the app must be as close to the user as possible.
Becoming widely adopted: Stanford, Johns Hopkins, US Natl Agriculture Lib, U Wisconsin, others; working on commercial ILS integration, GIS stuff, and more.
Posted by pzed on October 2, 2009 at 1.35pm
Categories: access 2009, conferences, libraries, twitter
