Sebastian Hammer of Indexdata talked about the problem with Metasearch where you have to create and maintain connectors to many different databases. This can require a shop full of highly qualified programmers to program an interface to each database, even if the db’s do Z39.50.
OCLC is putting Worldcat records, metadata from ArticleFirst which they license, and metadata from some vendors, Ebscohost and JSTOR, into a db that they will index and offer up for searching all together (it’s just metadata, not full text of articles and you link out the full articles, etc. at the vendor site).
In addition to this, where they don’t bring metadata in, they want to be able to go out and search the databases out there. They want the capability to search anything you can get to on the web, and they want libraries to be able to configure the connections and share their configurations to spread the work.
So Indexdata designed a connector Framework that Sebastian demonstrated. he went to the Chicago Art Institute web site and used this tool to pick out the search box, and then to pick out the pieces of the result set to show, etc. The tool creates a little xml file that then can be saved and used as a connector. This allows a much lower staff skill set to do this.It’s a way to put an API in front of a human facing web page and you could have community maintained connectors.
Matt Goldner of OCLC talked about how OCLC developed Worldcat then Worldcat Local and how they added Article First so there are 66 million metadatarecords now, but e says a billion would be more like it to cover what is needed. They are adding Ebsco and JSTOR soon (I talked to JSTOR later and they said OCLC is the only vendor they have an agreement with so far, they do this with lots of foreign vendors though).
There was also a demonstraton of the Worldcat Local tool where you can say what databases to include in searches for your patrons. It looked very rudimentary.
Seems like this is similar to the Serials Solutions Summon, except it does not index fulltext (they want to do in the future) and you configure which eresources manually I think Summon is based on knowing what you subscribe to. Goldner commented that the First Search interface is getting a littel old and tired. OCLC is not using the INdexdata Zoom they use their own search engine for this.
ALA 2009 OCLC Worldcat Local and MetaSearch
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