Dec
I so much enjoy Carl Grant’s writings. Last month I got to meet Carl in person at the Enterprise Search Summit conference where I led a panel on federated search that he was a member of. I have to say I enjoy Carl in person every bit as much as I do via email and phone. And, we had a great dinner at a Cuban restaurant in San Jose.
A few weeks ago Carl authored an article at the ExLibris Blog: Another facet of the “library bypass strategies.” Here’s a piece of it.
[A concern] is in the area of e-content and discovery products which are being offered to the library marketplace. Increasingly, these are offered as pre-packaged solutions with a discovery interface and with databases from a select number of organizations. But there are some real differences in the offerings and librarians need to be careful how they select and implement this technology.
Yes, this subject is not new. Nor is the conversation dead, I hope. Carl wrote a guest article for this blog, We don’t really need metasearch…, where he challenged librarians to assert their value. And, he raised concerns about the blind adoption of discovery services in another guest article, Beyond Federated Search – Winning the Battle and Losing the War?
There are two issues here. What value do librarians bring to their patrons and do discovery services erode that value? Carl’s latest piece on these subjects looks at the question of “how libraries might get bypassed in the context of e-book supply strategies.” He gives three criteria he believes libraries need to carefully consider when selecting a discovery tool (or e-content): “content-neutrality”, “deep-search and/or metasearch support,” and “The ability to load and search databases unique to your user’s information needs.”
As always when Carl writes, a great read.
Tags: federated search
