info on metasearch portal

Sitting in the back of a class for a late afternoon session on faceting search support in the Texas Heritage Online portal. One comparison made by a speaker, David Doorman is between the faceted search support enabled thru NCSU's Endeca instance and the support in the Texas Heritage Online system, given the richness and encoding consistency of metadata within a typical research library's ILS, which is not possible in the portal environment.

These are the factors that Doorman listed as affecting faceted searching in the metasearch/portal environment:

• Functionality of the metasearch client middleware
• Use of Z39.50/SRU by metasearch vendor and database provider
• Indexing and merging functions of metasearch middleware
• The user interface

(Being so close to the back, I can clearly hear the Marriott's jazz muzak in the background.)

Mark Phillips is now speaking about OAI-PMH to expand the Heritage Repository's access to institutions which lack support for either Z39.50 or SRU. For indexing OAI records, Python conversion scripts were created to break up large XML files into smaller files; the data are reformatted for Solr and are then sent to Solr for indexing. Phillips then discussed the challenges in building in SRU support. I feel very comfortable with the OAI-PMH side of this discussion, much less so with SRU.

I had a chance to speak with Doorman following this session. He stated the importance of the Z39.50 protocol and noted that though it's seen as an "old technology" by many library automation professionals, Z39.50 and SRU have the ability to support rich metadata searching that's difficult to achieve by other means.