Hi all,
I've added a topic to the hack-a-way agenda to discuss Evergreen search.
However, I wanted to raise the topic here on the list first since the
discussion may require some forethought and because I imagine there are
people interested in this discussion who won't be attending the hack-a-way.
In discussing our development priorities for the year, MassLNC decided
to focus on making improvements to search in Evergreen. We view search
as one of the most important pieces of the ILS, if not the most
important. It's what allows our users to find those resources we spend
so much time cataloging so that they can then place holds on them, check
them out from the library, or access them in some other way.
There are some specific development projects we identified as
possibilities: Did you Mean? functionality, working auto-suggest,
improved speed, etc. However, rather than tacking these improvements on
to the existing search, we thought it might be a good time for the
community to step back, take a big-picture look at how we're doing
search, and determine if we should continue down this path, if we need
to make major underlying changes for our current path to be more
performant/effective, or if we should consider moving to something else
to handle Evergreen search.
Would it be worthwhile to move to something like Solr or Elasticsearch
or something other thing to handle Evergreen searches? If not, are there
changes we should do to better utilize improvements full-text search
that have been made to recent versions of PostgreSQL? I don't have the
answers to these questions, but I think it's worthwhile for the
community to identify what we expect of Evergreen search and to do a
thorough analysis of available options to determine what will best help
us attain those goals.
Over the past few months, the folks at MassLNC have started a discussion
of what our overall goals for search are. From these discussions, we
have created a vision for what we would like to see in Evergreen search
- http://masslnc.org/search_vision .
From this search vision, we then identified specific areas of
improvements / new features that would help Evergreen reach this vision.
We also identified areas where we already are doing well and will want
to maintain - http://masslnc.org/node/3164.
I'm sure there are some areas where others may disagree with our ideas,
but I'm guessing there are other areas where we'll get broad community
consensus around some of these search priorities.
I don't think we're in a position where we can choose a direction at the
hack-a-way, but maybe we can do the following:
* At the hack-a-way, can we have a discussion to see if there is
interest in this project? We might also be able to identify some viable
options that could be explored at the hack-a-way.
* After the hack-a-way, the community could work on setting and
prioritizing high-level goals for search in the Evergreen catalog.
Ideally, we would have these search goals ready by the end of the
calendar year. I would be willing to help facilitate this process.
* After the goals are identified, we explore available options to see
which will the best to help us attain those goals. It would be great if
we had the ability to do some prototypes during this phase, but this
would depend on people having the time / resources to do those prototypes.
* Ideally, by the time we meet again at the conference hackfest in
April, we'll be in a position where we can set a direction for search
and then move forward with development.
I'm sure the process won't be as simple as what I outlined above, and
all of you may have better ideas on the best ways to evaluate our
options. But I'm hoping this email helps us kick off a conversation that
ultimately leads to fast and relevant search in Evergreen.
Thanks!
Kathy
--
Kathy Lussier
Project Coordinator
Massachusetts Library Network Cooperative
(508) 343-0128
[email protected]
Twitter:http://www.twitter.com/kmlussier
