Open Source Library PortalsRon Davies, Ian Hamilton

Central Library, European Commissionron.davies@ec.europa.eu, ian.hamilton@ec.europa.eu

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?