Technologies For Hybrid Libraries: Implementation Issues Brian Kelly UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath, BA2 7AY UKOLN is funded by the Library and Information Commission, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC and the European Union. UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based. This talk looks at what the HE community is doing and raises some implementation issues: What's happening with searching? Deployment models Cultural Issues This talk looks at what the HE community is doing and raises some implementation issues: What's happening with searching? Deployment models Cultural Issues

2 Where Are We Now? Analysis of institutional web search engines carried out in summer 1999 Report published in Ariadne web magazine See

3 Access to institutional search engines is available at: Information is being maintained and a follow-up article will be published Accessing The Search Engines Could be used as basis for a metasearch service of UK Universities

4 What Are The Trends? Institutions seem to be: Moving away from aging research-like tools (Harvest, wwwwais, …) Moving towards popular, out-of-a-box solutions (ht://Dig, Webinator, etc) Interested in commercial products, especially for distributed sites (e.g. Ultraseek) Smaller sites are experimenting with third-party indexes (e.g. using AltaVista) Little interest in re-use of search results

5 Areas Of Interest Postings on mailing lists indicate interest in: Indexing binary formats (esp. MS Word, PDF, etc. Indexing multiple servers Managing preferred hits (e.g. PDF over HTML) Appears to be little interest in: Hybrid libraries (apart from usual suspects) Cross-searching Subject-specific searching Moving remote search interface to local server

6 Some Exceptions The Universities for the North East web site provides a search interface for searching across several web sites – see OMNI host search interfaces to remote medical services – see

7 Some Exceptions (2) UCISA TLIG have a pilot index of computing service documentation See

8 Web Gateways Workshop session on "Managing Your Institutional Web Gateway": Held at JUSW in Sept 1999 – see Many gateways have been forgotten about Many don't appear to have quality assurance or scoping procedures Unclear management responsibilities Little evidence of use of "portal management" software (with some exceptions such as Leeds, Cranfield, etc.) Report to be published in Ariadne shortly

9 Case Study Kingston public library has a well-designed gateway which uses a backend database. The top 10 links is an example of a value-added service

10 Approaches to Deployment A question for University web teams: "How can the new technologies and standards be deployed in our environment?" Should we: Ignore them? (Browser x doesn’t do CSS, authoring tools don’t do RDF, etc.) Accept them fully? Accept them partly? Other alternatives

11 Deployment Do Nothing Cheap – no new software, additional training, … Safe Fails to address performance or accessibility issues Difficult to do new stuff Addresses performance & accessibility issues Can deploy new types of applications Expensive Testing needed Backwards compatibility issues Use New Developments Compromise approach Might be expensive in identifying safe features Use "Safe" Developments Use of intelligent servers and proxies Might be expensive Complicated? A Fourth Way

12 Cultural Issues Should we do it ourselves, do it within the open source, research community, or make use of commercial software? Do It Ourselves Exploit enthusiasm No expensive reporting mechanisms How the web first developed in the UK Do It Ourselves Exploit enthusiasm No expensive reporting mechanisms How the web first developed in the UK Open Source / Community Use of Linux Community software such as IMESH Toolkit Collaboration with initiatives such as RDN Open Source / Community Use of Linux Community software such as IMESH Toolkit Collaboration with initiatives such as RDN Use of Commercial Products Use MS products such as SiteServer (cf BUILDER) Use other licensed software (portal management systems) Use of Commercial Products Use MS products such as SiteServer (cf BUILDER) Use other licensed software (portal management systems)

13 Questions Some questions for general discussion: Do we need to develop a hybrid libraries or can we rely on interfaces to general search engines (such as AltaVista or a UK-only search engine)? Many indexing products (Ultraseek, ht://Dig, MS SiteServer, etc.) can index remote sites. Why isn't more of this being done? Is it a scalable solution? Robot Indexers vs. Other Solutions What is the preferred solution for the future:  Robot indexers indexing lots of sites  Sites providing access using Z39.50 (or an alternative)

14 Conclusions To conclude: eLib phase 3 projects seem to be ahead of the community There are various deployment models for new standards:  Don't implement  Implement fully  Implement via proxy  Other solutions There are a number of approaches to use of applications to implement new standards