in Open Access, Open Archives Initiative, Open Source, Open URL, Open WorldCat, Vendors

Open source metasearch

Now there’s a new kid on the (meta)search block. LibraryFind, an open-source project funded by the State Library of Oregon, is currently live at Oregon State University. The library has just packaged up a release for anyone to download and install.

Jeremy Frumkin, Gray chair for Innovative Library Services at OSU, said the goals were to contribute to the support of scholarly workflow, remove barriers between the library and Web information, and to establish the digital library as platform.

Lead developers Dan Chudnov, soon to join the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives, and Terry Reese, catalog librarian and developer of popular application MarcEdit, worked with the following guiding principles: Two clicks–one to find, and one to get; a goal of getting results in four seconds, and known and adjustable results ranking.

Other OSU project members included Tami Herlocker, point person for interface development, and Ryan Ordway, system administrator. Frumkin said, “The Ruby on Rails platform provided easy, quick user interface development. It gives a variety of UI possibilities, and offers new interfaces for different user groups.”

The application includes collaborations on the OpenURL module from Ross Singer, library applications developer at the Georgia Tech library, and Ed Summers, Library of Congress developer. Journal coverage can be imported from a SerialsSolutions export, and more import facilities are planned in upcoming releases.

OSU is working on a contract with OCLC’s WorldCat to download data, and is looking to build greater trust relationships with vendors. “The upside for vendors is they can see how their data is used when developing new services,” Frumkin said.

Future enhancements include an information dashboard and a personal digital library. Developers are also staffing a support chatroom for technical support, help, and development discussion of LibraryFind.

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