Metasearch Infrastructure Project: Current Status
The Metasearch Infrastructure Project seeks to develop a robust set of tools for crafting tailored search interfaces to diverse information resources for specific audiences and/or purposes. For additional background information, see the project web site at [http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/metasearch/].
Significant progress has been made integrating MetaLib with the CDL Common Framework (see: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/common_framework/) for more information. Concurrent with this has been work to generalize the Common User Interface (CUI) component of the Common Framework so it serves the needs of the metasearch infrastructure as well as the Digital Preservation Repository and other services that will rely on the Common Framework. CDL’s goal is to have a prototype search portal focused on earth sciences available in May for usability testing with undergraduates. This is in partial fulfillment of our National Science Digital Library (NSDL) grant, and will serve to provide us with important early feedback on what should be changed before getting campuses more closely involved. During the spring we will also be improving the back-end infrastructure with the goal of making it easy for campuses to deploy portals.
Preliminary work was done to develop an interface component that allows librarians to automatically load an RSS feed into the entry page of a search portal.
Work has also been completed to expose harvested metadata records to searching via the SRU protocol (see <http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/>), which will enable integration of harvested metadata along with, or beside, licensed database results. Additionally, a utility that was created in association with our harvesting work to normalize dates in harvested metadata was released to the library community (see <http://www.cdlib.org/inside/diglib/datenorm/>).
Campus Developments
Campus staff (from UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Santa Cruz and UC Irvine) continue to advise us on the prototype Earth Sciences NSDL portal. The UCLA European Studies portal team is on hold until we gain experience with our first portal and have improved our infrastructure. Present plans are to make our nascent infrastructure available to the UCLA team this summer for setup and testing.
Campus staff will also be helping us with usability testing in May. CDL staff will be coordinating with campus staff to find appropriate facilities, find students to participate, etc.
The “SmartStart” portal team, which includes members from UCSC and UCLA, will likely also be reinvigorated to plan a portal aimed at undergraduates and/or those who want “a few good things.”
CDL staff continue to work with other MetaLib X-Server users and Ex Libris staff to identify, prioritize, and implement enhancements to the X-Server infrastructure.