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One-Stop Searching With a Can-Do AttitudeMay 26, 2009 The National Library of Australia recently released a prototype of their "Single Business Discovery Project", which is one of the best "one-stop shopping" discovery portals I've seen. The scope is truly massive, with a search for "Chicago" netting over 780,000 items, and even 13,000-plus items for "Sonoma", which finds a photo taken maybe three miles from my house in California. Although the stated focus is to surface Australian content, it's clear the net has been cast quite wide, and for good reason.It may seem like a relatively easy thing to narrow one's focus geographically, but it's harder than you might imagine. There can be Australian-appropriate content virtually anywhere in the world, so how do you go about loading only that? Besides, if you can aggregate access to a massive amount of really good stuff, why narrow the focus too much? Whatever design decisions they made along the way, so far I like what I see. And they're nowhere near done. "We will now be going all out," Warwick Cathro of the NLA reported in an email to me this week, "to get additional content for this service such as (a) high level collection guides and finding aids from libraries and archives (b) oral history summaries and transcripts (c) metadata describing datasets, especially Australian social science data held by government or research data archives)." For starters, they have 19 million records from the Australian National Bibliographic Database and 20 million records from OAIster, and a few hundred thousand records from multiple other sources, including the Hathi Trust, the Open Library, and Wikipedia. Anyway you count it, it's a lot of stuff indexed in one place. For the propeller-heads among you, Warwick said the technology stack consists of:
Posted by Roy Tennant on May 26, 2009 | Comments (0) Industries: News & Features
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