Open Source Library PortalsRon Davies, Ian Hamilton
Central Library, European [email protected], [email protected]
The opinions expressed in this presentation are those of the authors and do not express the opinion of the European Commission
OS/Portals Timeline
1999 20042003200220012000 200720062005
Met
aLib
Muse
Global
jakeOpenSiteSearch
KohaEvergreen (PINES)
Libra
ryFin
d
Web
feat
Emilda
oss4lib
dbWiz
LibraryFind
... dbWiz
OpenSite
Searc
h
... ......
Portals
Open Source
Evaluating commercial software
Functionality
Cost
Technology, Vendor
35 %
55 %
10 %
Evaluating OS software
Functionality
Technology
Community
55 %
25 %
20 %
Common features Three OS portals
OpenSite Search, dbWiz, LibraryFind Common features
Create categories of different resources Perform federated search using Z39.50 Search (author, title, subject, keyword) Merge and sort search results Link to native search No saved searches or SDI function
OpenSiteSearch Developed by OCLC Released as open source in 2002 Functionality
Build fixed or dynamic categories of resources Sophisticated search facilities De-duplication Email results Local holdings check Local database creation including modification
OpenSiteSearch Technology
Java, Perl, Pears database Variety of UNIX OSes, WinNT Only supports Z39.50 as search protocol
Community High quality development No demo, documentation not updated Little recent activity (meetings, discussion list)
OpenSiteSearch
dbWiz Simon Fraser University and 9 partners Part of reSearcher suite (GODOT, CUFTS) Functionality
Supports Z39.50, SQL, SOAP, Web interfaces Comes with collection of connectors Dynamic selection of individual resources Rank/weight each database separately Hits retrieved configurable per resource
dbWiz Functionality (con’t)
Search history Filter by date, full text, academic level Simple relevance ranking OpenURL linking with GODOT No email of results
dbWiz Technology
UNIX (Red Hat Linux) Perl, Perl Template Toolkit for configuration YAZ for Z39.50, postgreSQL Good documentation
Community Used by 30+ institutions, 2 users in Europe Demo site, trac wiki Service for non-profit fee
LibraryFind Oregon State University, 2007 Grant from State Library Functionality
Harvested dbs as well as distributed search Configuration rather than connector approach
(Z39.50, OAI, Web services) Users can’t select individual resources Built-in OpenURL resolver Relevance ranking, faceted search
LibraryFind Technology
Ruby on Rails YAZ and Ruby/Zoom, MySQL for db ferret for searching of harvested resources
Community Oregon State University, interest from others Limited documentation Wiki, list, road map for development
Making a choice Is Open Source for you / your organisation?
Skills available in the necessary technologies? Institutional support?
What kind of portal? What kind of information resources? What kind of search? Z39.50? OAI? SQL? Web
services? HTML? Locally-hosted, harvested resources? Need to get it up quickly?