#web-scale discovery

[stephenfrancoeur]

Pull quote: "For me the disadvantages for this [bento box approach] are in the lack of any overriding relevancy ranking for the material and that it perpetuates the ‘silo’ing’ of content to an extent (Books, Articles, Databases etc) which is driven largely by the underlying silos of systems that we rely on to manage that content. I’ve never been entirely convinced that users understand the distinction about what a ‘database’ might be. But the approach is probably as good as we can get until we get to truly unified resource management and more control over relevancy ranking."

[stephenfrancoeur]

Pull quote: "It certainly looks like a interesting approach and starts to make me wonder about the future of library websites being little more than a single search box."

[stephenfrancoeur]

Pull quote: "The power of discovery, in my way of thinking, is not just in harnessing the local and the global — which is something in and of itself — but in providing tailored, focused access to that breadth. It’s not just the Mississippi as it dumps into the Gulf of Mexico; it’s just the right tributaries out of thousands that feed into the torrent."

[stephenfrancoeur]

Pull quote: "So you look at bringing together content from different systems, probably using the Bento Box approach...where you search across your different systems using APIs etc and return a series of results from each of those systems. You then get a series of results that come from each of the different systems and incorporate the relevancy ranking of discovery systems, rather than ranking the relevancy of the results in total. So is that going to be any better for users? Is it going to be better to sort the results by system, as Stanford have done? or should we be trying to pull results together, as Google do? That’s something we need to test."