Open Source Library Portals Ron Davies, Ian Hamilton Central Library, European Commission The opinions expressed in this presentation are those of the authors and do not express the opinion of the European Commission

OS/Portals Timeline MetaLib MuseGlobal jake OpenSiteSearch Koha Evergreen (PINES) LibraryFind Webfeat Emildaoss4lib dbWiz LibraryFind... dbWiz OpenSiteSearch... 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  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 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?