Week Eight Postings

The chapter on OAI-PHM is useful for comparing and contrasting that approach to that of Z39.50, which is then discussed by Lynch. I think we should have read the Lynch article much earlier in the semester, if not much earlier in the program. In short, Z39.50 “is a protocol which specifies data structures and interchange rules that allow a client machine (called an "origin" in the standard) to search databases on a server machine (called a "target" in the standard) and retrieve records that are identified as a result of such a search.”

From this protocol, all things flow, including the subject of the next three articles, federated searches. As someone who is about to purchase and implement a federated search engine at an academic library, these made for interesting reads. In particular, Miller’s final sentences spoke to me: “The paradox demonstrated so elegantly by Google is that the most powerful information access approach also happens to be the simplest and easiest. The most complex and least intuitive interfaces wind up securing information, not facilitating information access.” I hadn’t thought of Google as being a federated search, but it’s true. Occam’s razor is certainly in effect here and we must always take patrons into account.
Hane’s article was strong on the limits of federated searching, but for my purposes in a library setting such a tool introduces users to resources they have not yet explored, and thus may help maximize a library’s returns on its investments in terms of electronic holdings/databases.
Finally, Lossau had me wondering if I shouldn’t be including Google Scholar and Google Books in any federated search I set up. Asking how libraries determine what is academic is a simple, but powerful question, but this article is also a bit dated; increasingly librarians, myself included, see libraries as portals and gateways as opposed to collections.