We are often asked about where we stand on the discussion of central indexing versus broadcast metasearching. Our standard answer: “You probably need some of both” always calls for further explanation. Some time ago, I wrote this up for a potential business partner. If it sounds a little like a marketing spiel… guilty as charged. […]
spent most of last week up in Edinburgh, for the Open Edge conference on open-source software in libraries, attended mostly by academic librarians and their technical people. It was an interesting time, and I met a lot of interesting people. At the risk of overusing the word “interesting”, it was also of interest to see how widespread […]
We’ve been investigating ways we might add result clustering to our metasearch tools. Here’s a short introduction to the topic and to an open source platform for experimenting in this area. Clustering Using a search interface that just takes some keywords often leads to miscommunication. The computer has no sense of context and users may not […]
We have always held that the schism between broadcast metasearching and local indexing is rather goofy – that in practice, you do whatever it takes to get the results in front of your user when and where he needs it, and the best solutions will allow for whatever approach is needed in the moment. Inspired […]
Our metasearch middleware, Pazpar2, spends a lot of time doing XML transformations. When we use Pazpar2 with traditional library data sources that return MARC21, we internally convert the received records into MARCXML (if they’re not already represented as such) and then transform into the internal pazpar2 XML format using XSLT (more on this process here). MARCXML is nice to look at, but it’s not an optimal format […]
Inspired by Jakub’s posting yesterday, I wondered how easy it would be to build an HTTP-to-Z39.50 gateway similar to his in Ruby, my language of the moment. Different languages offer different tools and different ways of doing things, and it’s always instructive to compare. Ruby libraries are generally distributed in the form of “gems”: packages analogous to […]
Yaz4J is a wrapper library over the client-specific parts of YAZ, a C-based Z39.50 toolkit, and allows you to use the ZOOM API directly from Java. Initial version of Yaz4j has been written by Rob Styles from Talis and the project is now developed and maintained at Index Data. ZOOM is a relatively straightforward API and with a few lines of code you can write a basic […]
Recently, my son asked me a series of questions about the cold war, and the political/military paradigm of mutually assured destruction (MAD for short). It’s always seemed like an odd premise to me, and somehow, discussing it with a 13-year old doesn’t make it look any more sensible. However, we came to agree that landing on […]