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August 24, 2005
EuclidPLUS vs. Library Catalog
The university's integrated library system that manages circulation/OhioLINK functions, as well as cataloging, collection budget control, acquisitions and other core library technology functions, has for the past ten years been known as "EuclidPLUS."
Over the next few months we will transition from the name "EuclidPLUS" to the more generic "Library Catalog." Publications and web references will be changed gradually to phase out the older name which no longer has meaning in a much broader technology environment. It is anticipated that the web public library catalog user interface will have a major facelift and overhaul over the course of the next year.
Technorati Tags: Case Western Reserve University
Posted by tdr at August 24, 2005 11:35 AM
Comments
Hooray!
Posted by: Aaron Shaffer at August 24, 2005 11:54 AM
Don't stop there!
How about trying to clean up some of the confusing and/or misleading terms/links/page names elsewhere in the UL web space? My personal pet peeve is the "Research Databases" page, which includes many entities that most definitely are not databases (e.g. most of the contents of the O'Reilly/Safari On-Line service). Then there are the multiple "Electronic Journal" collections in the pop-up menu on the catalog page (one of which is called "electronic books and journals", but is a very bad place to go looking for many of the e-books available to Case users).
A quick check of the "Library Catalog" seems to indicate that items which we can access via network are not catalogued--there is no entry for either "Safari On-Line" or for the individual items in Safari (e.g. "Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide"--though there is a "you can't get there from here" teaser for the LIB USE ONLY (Reference?) copy).
Will (or could) a meta-search engine be built that can do title or author queries against *all* of the various catalogs (EuclidPLUS, OhioLink E-Journals, the other E-Journal thingy, etc.) to which Case users have access, and return aggregate results?
Posted by: Jim at August 25, 2005 12:58 AM
I wish for the same, some sort of aggregate search that searches all the catalogs.
Posted by: Aaron at August 25, 2005 10:38 AM
Jim and Aaron,
The concept of federated searching (or "aggregated searching" as you called it) is the Holy Grail of digital libraries. There has been and continues to be a great deal of research in the topic by leading research entities (including OCLC, which manages the world's largest bibliographic database). Although progress has been made, the fact that there are a variety of un-unified protocols that are used for constructing library catalogs makes it a very difficult proposition. Z39.50 is a standard that is supposed to make it possible; however Z39.50 is not very robust or capable. But just sticking the open source Lucene search engine in front of a bunch of stuff is not the answer.
Jim, to your question of other editing on the KSL (note that the terms UL and University Library have gone away) web page, your points are well taken. The issue of what to put on the Research Database page is one that the library staff has wrestled with a lot here, and we finally decided that to be more inclusive is better than to be less inclusive.
One of the issues that we have with such licensed collections as Safari books (especially those for which we have access through OhioLINK) is that the vendors tend to change the content of the collections arbitrarily and without notice, adding and deleting conent--the list of contents is not static over time. So something might be there today and gone tomorrow. If we catalog them separately in our library catalog and then something goes away, we are left with a cataloging record that doesn't go anywhere, and we might or might not even know it.
That said, we know that Safari books are used heavily on this campus and that there would be benefit in having direct access to the individual titles from the library catalog. I've had a discussion with Chris Thornton, our head of cataloging, this morning, and we will investigate the feasibility of including these titles in our catalog.
tdr
Posted by: tim Robson at August 25, 2005 11:04 AM