Feb
In November 2006, the National Agricultural Library, one of four U.S. national libraries and stewards of one of the world’s largest agricultural information collections, hosted a NISO conference. Normally, I wouldn’t bore you with a post about a conference over a year old, but in this one, the list of vendors whose staffs delivered presentations reads like a Who’s Who in federated search.
NISO (National Information Standards Organization) is a standards body, accredited by ANSI, that develops, publishes, and maintains standards related to digital information management. Most well known of the NISO standards are ANSI/NISO Z39.2, the basis for the MARC record, ANSI/NISO Z39.2, the ISSN standard for serial numbering, and ANSI/NISO Z39.50, the client/server protocol for information retrieval. NISO also has sponsored a Metasearch Initiative. The Initiative page explains its aim and groundwork laid:
To move toward industry solutions NISO sponsored a Metasearch Initiative to enable:
- metasearch service providers to offer more effective and responsive services
- content providers to deliver enhanced content and protect their intellectual property
- libraries to deliver services that distinguish their services from Google and other free web services.
The groundwork for NISO’s Metasearch Initiative was laid in two important events:
- A 2-day Strategy Meeting in May 2003 defined the metasearch state-of-the-art and built consensus on ways to move forward; and
- A Metasearch workshop in October 2003 informed librarians, content providers, aggregators about metasearch.
The conference, Discovery to Delivery: Solutions to Put Your Content Where the Users Are, ran for a day and a half and included a number of federated search vendors among its speakers:
- Frank Bilotto, from MuseGlobal, on “Beyond Visualization and Clustering in the D2D Environment”
- Mary Jackson, from Auto-Graphics, Inc. on “Emerging User-Centered Service Models for D2D”
- Karen Groves, from Ex Libris, Inc. on “Case Study: Opening Your Content to Metasearch Services: The Bepress and Ex Libris Experience”
- Todd Miller, from WebFeat, lead a panel on “Solutions Forum: Federated Search Case Studies”
- Jane Burke, from ProQuest/Serials Solutions, on “Bridging the Technology Gaps in Discovery to Delivery”
- Karen Groves from Ex Libris, Sandy Hurd from Innovative Interfaces, Inc., and Todd Miller from WebFeat, held a panel on “Solutions Forum: The Future of D2D”
Presentations are available at the conference page for all of the talks and panels. Speakers from other (non-federated search) organizations also delivered presentations that will likely be of interest to readers of this blog.
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