Heads they win, tales we lose: Discovery tools will never deliver on their promise is an enlightening tail on a problem topic maps may or may not solve.
From the post:
As strange as it may sound, the future is not in unified databases powering discovery tools, Matt told me yesterday. He can’t foresee a time when the major database vendors will find it profitable to combine their metadata for our benefit. Instead, the future is in hybrid systems that combine discovery and federation. As I see it, libraries will have to decide if they care whether their EBSCO products or their ProQuest products are seamlessly integrated, choose the discovery layer that matches the company of their choice, and then federate in the content from the other database providers. Federated search is dead; long live federated search. And I’m sure the thinking at EBSCO is that we’ll be paying someone for a discovery tool, and that someone should be them.
(Matt in that quote is Matt Andros, Vice President of Field Sales at EBSCO, a major online content vendor.)
One wonders what it would look like to have a local, federated overlay for viewing a vendor’s resources.
Create metadata about their metadata/data. Have to show it in order for you to use it.
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Pingback by Tweets that mention Heads they win, tales we lose: Discovery tools will never deliver on their promise – Post « Another Word For It -- Topsy.com — January 24, 2011 @ 2:21 am
You wrote “One wonders what it would look like to have a local, federated overlay for viewing a vendor’s resources.” Well, is this what you’re looking for? http://roddymacleod.wordpress.com/2011/01/20/a-real-low-cost-alternative-to-expensive-library-search-database-systems/
Comment by Rodddy MacLeod — January 24, 2011 @ 6:52 am
@Roddy – Interesting but no. Thinking more along the lines of how does one consolidate search results from say EBSCO and Springer, so that the user is presented with one “hit” per journal article. That in a medical school setting also has pointers to ongoing trials if relevant.
Comment by Patrick Durusau — January 26, 2011 @ 1:19 pm