Hi Geoff - we are actually not syncing right now, as we would like to
get a better sense of which of these approaches makes the most sense.
I am much more enamored of the "OPAC federated search" approach than I
am of syncing everything to the bib database: thinking about syncing
in terms of eJournals can be contemplated, but what about when you add
others like government documents, or other collections that we used to
add to the bib database when they were in our print collections - it
starts to get hairy.
We are starting to get a little further into the Evergreen code (or at
least our new programmer, Alexander O'Neill is) and it is not
necessarily hard to imagine doing a mash-up: query the Evergreen DB
and the CUFTS DB, bring the results back and present them in grouped
sections (e.g. journals and monographs in separate tabs or display
groups) - or maybe as facets. Lots of possibilities - especially with
a system like Evergreen that allows you to get under the hood!
I also agree 100% on the change in workflow to focus on eJournals - if
you have something like what we've described here then you don't need
to mirror them in the OPAC...
Mark
On 8-Sep-08, at 11:55 AM, Geoff Sinclair wrote:
Mark Leggott wrote:
One could also think a little more creatively and not sync changes
between the 2, but rather enable both databases into a search from
the OPAC - in other words searching in the OPAC would conduct a
search on both Evergreen and CUFTS at the same time, mashing
results back to the user. Adding a "federated search" capability
into the Evergreen front-end would have benefits elsewhere as well.
One of the compelling features of Evergreen for us was the modular
architecture - in fact I would argue that Evergreen already
provides a nice OLE-like architecture for building modular library
frameworks, so why not show how it can be done?
I like this approach because it's cleaner conceptually, but what
about the performance considerations (both response time and search
functionality)? And, since you're already syncing now, have you
built a real-time feed, or are you doing a nightly batch?
More generally, we plan to shift our systems and workflows to focus
primarily on e-journals, reducing the time and money spent on print,
and we believe this will benefit our patrons. Our e-journal holdings
aren't even in our OPAC, but, through some customization, we have
managed to get our print and microfilm holdings into our OpenURL
resolver (SFX). I wonder if having 5% of our journals in the OPAC is
worse than having none at all...understandably, our patrons have a
hard time understanding where to go to find our resources.
Geoff
--
Geoff Sinclair
Manager of Technical Services
Education Centre Library, Nipissing University / Canadore College
Tel: 705-474-3450 x4439
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Web: http://www.eclibrary.ca
