1. Open Source Library Portals Ron Davies, Ian Hamilton Central Library, European Commission ron.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

2. OS/Portals Timeline 199920042003200220012000200720062005 MetaLib MuseGlobal jake OpenSiteSearch Koha Evergreen (PINES) LibraryFind Webfeat Emildaoss4lib dbWiz LibraryFind... dbWiz OpenSiteSearch... Portals Open Source

3. Evaluating commercial software Functionality Cost Technology, Vendor 35 % 55 % 10 %

4. Evaluating OS software Functionality Technology Community 55 % 25 % 20 %

5. 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

6. 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

9. 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)

10. OpenSiteSearch

11. 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

13. dbWiz Functionality (con’t)  Search history  Filter by date, full text, academic level  Simple relevance ranking  OpenURL linking with GODOT  No email of results

15. 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

17. 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

20. 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

21. 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?