Search
One theme I noted at the Access 2005 conference (at least for the brief time I was there) was federated search. This is a useful evolution on the current mess of a search landscape that library users are faced with. Why, after all, should I have to visit five or ten different portals just to get the information I need? In that sense, federate search interfaces can be a nice simple access point.
Yet in the long-term, I don’t think portal-based federated search interfaces are the way to go, at least not without ways to integrate search more directly into user workflows. It seems Lorcan Dempsey said much the same thing in his talk (which I missed; ppt here), where he demonstrated work they were doing with Microsoft’s Research Pane to integrate online content into the desktop workflow.
At the OpenOffice bibliographic project we long ago settled on the notion–with a lot of help from Rob Sanderson and Matthew Dovey–that we ought to adopt a unified approach to local and remote queries. Why use different APIs and code and interfaces to query a data store just because it happens to be on the network?
Along somewhat similar break-out-of-the-box lines, Peter Sefton posted a note to the OOoBib dev list with an idea:
As I write, I’ve been making hyperlinks to various web resources, lots of government pages, but a few refereed papers from various sources. This is fine while I’m in draft mode and the document is usable and sharable.
Later, when I want to publish it more formally it would be great if some software could find all my links and for each one look for a bibliographic reference in my local store (whatever that might be) and if there is none search other places that might have bibliographic data linked to that URL. If no data can be found it would add an entry to my database with as much data as it could pre-set (eg title may be able to be scraped from an HTML page) so I can fill out the rest. Once I have entered the data locally it should be aggregated ‘up’ to my workgroup / institution.
Everything I want to refer to in the report I’m working on now is available on the open web, but I could refer to books, say, by pointing at the local campus library system on the web (with some convention for page references) and that should be enough for smart software to automatically grab the details for my bibliography later.
This is like the idea of adding a citation by reference but without needing a formal ID. It’s like the EndNote ‘cite while you write’ somewhat backwards, with citation coming long before ‘proper’ data capture.
I hadn’t thought of things quite this way, but it is indeed an interesting idea, particularly if you couple it with a more distributed vision of metadata. For example, in the long run, perhaps it’ll be possible to simply cite and have software pull in the metadata from the web, rather than having to store it locally.
Alas, this gets to the tricky subjects of identifiers that I and others have struggled with. With what uri identifier would one cite resources? With a webpage, the answer is simple. But the question quickly gets more complex.
