No, I did not drop off the face of the planet, and I recognize that 13 days without a post is the blogospheric equivalent of digital disappearance. Vacation, followed by vacation recovery, was the cause of my absence. Summer is coming to an end. Classes at NCSU start today. My kids go back to elementary school next week. We made it through another summer. In the meantime, there have been some library automation happenings of note.

I think we made it through the entire summer season without the loss, merger, or acquisition of a single ILS entity! Some attrition at ILS giant SirsiDynix continues, but the firm did appoint a new COO. Matthew Hawkins will be responsible for the company’s Client Care, Implementation, and Consulting & Education organizations. He will be based in Provo, Utah.

A long, hot summer still has room for some acquisitions. The Berkeley Electronic Press (BePress) announced that it would be purchasing Digital Commons, a turnkey Institutional Repository (IR) solution, from ProQuest. This is not a huge surprise given the rise in IR awareness and the fact that BePress created the software in the first place.

Don't go thinking that ProQuest is going anywhere. On one of its many other fronts, AquaBrowser (owned by Bowker, which is owned by ProQuest) announced today that it would be setting up dedicated sales and support in North America, namely New York City. And who better to lead that group than the person who led AquaBrowser sales for The Library Corporation? Jimmy Thomas, former Director of Strategic Products with TLC, will become the AquaBrowser Library Product Director, North America. Of course, this does reposition TLC's exclusive distributorship deal with Medialab, the former owner of the AquaBrowser software. Quoting from the release:

"The Library Corporation will remain an external AquaBrowser distribution partner of Medialab in the U.S. and Canada. New AquaBrowser customers now have the choice to purchase AquaBrowser either directly through the new dedicated AquaBrowser team in the U.S., or through the proven services from The Library Corporation."

It seems moderately odd that AquaBrowser would juxtapose its "new-ness" against TLC's "proven-ness." But who am I to judge? AquaBrowser has even more to be happy about with the incorporation of LibraryThing data in its interface.

Making stranger bedfellows is a deal between Care Affiliates and WebFeat for the latter to provide its library of database connectors for Index Data's Masterkey federated search solution. This could very well be a model for open source and proprietary software collaboration, in that open source metasearch solutions have a "last mile" problem in connecting to databases for which there is no standard connection protocol. Whether the connectors themselves will now be available as open source remains to be seen.

Every time I look, metasearch is still with us. Part of me keeps hoping it will go away, but nope, it's still there. And thank goodness that there are enough people and companies out there still trying to make it better.

Index Data announced Monday that they have created IRSpy, a registry of information retrieval targets that support Z39.50 and SRW/SRU. "Each registry entry consists of both database level information, such as the indexes supported for searching and the record syntax and schemas supported for retrieval, and record level metadata such as titles, authors, and descriptions." Such a registry has long been needed by the metasearch industry. It could even fulfill another need—the creation of a list of targets that adhere to standards, thus distinguishing themselves from those that still require screen-scraping, HTML parsing, and other technical hoops that continue to support a metasearch middleware industry.

Regardless, the middleware industry continues, and continues to improve its software. Most vendors have implemented some sort of clustered or faceted browsing into their interfaces. Those that haven't have plans in the works: WebFeat announced several new product offerings at ALA this year, including more robust administrative tools, a proxy server for single sign-on, and an upgrade (version 3.0) to WebFeat Express.

Not to be outdone by the open source ILS industry, two projects continue to get traction in the open metasearch environment. IRSpy, mentioned above, is a nice complement to Index Data's re-engineered MasterKey. LibraryFind, which includes features like an OpenURL resolver and the ability to index local collections, is another option from the Oregon State University Libraries. LibraryFind was developed using Ruby on Rails, which has become quite popular among open source developers.

Lest we forget, there is still a large contingent of people who hope that the need for metasearch will one day be obviated. Google Scholar is still moving (though hardly hurtling) toward that goal with the recent inclusion of ScienceDirect content. Rather than repeat it, I will simply point to Peter Brantley's nice commentary. What will become of Scopus? If we're hurtling toward anything, it might just be one of the first viable pay-by-the-drink models for scholarly content. As if library collection budgets weren't difficult enough.

As OCLC Openly's Eric Hellman once commented at a NISO meeting on metasearch standards, "Metasearch will work perfectly when all the data is in one database." Until then, we struggle onward.

I just got back from Nashville and the 9th annual LITA Forum--the second of four trips in just under 3 weeks. Next I'm off to NISO's Discovery to Delivery, and then I wind up my fall travel in Charleston. You're probably wondering how I get any work done...the secret is I don't.

Anyway, the LITA Forum is always a great chance to catch up with colleagues, see some good presentations and thoughtful keynotes, and just hang out. I was pleased to see more public librarians in attendance this year. There were just shy of 400 in in Nashville. For some very good coverage of the sessions, check out the LITA Blog site.

I could go on and on about several of the presentations, but one I wanted to mention in particular was given by Adam Chandler and David Ruddy (Cornell University) and Ted Koppell (Ex Libris) on the SUSHI protocol. SUSHI is an automated way to transfer COUNTER compliant electronic resource usage statistics. Links to the respective sites provide more details.

The idea makes a lot of sense, and keeps libraries and middleware ERM providers from having to devise ways to collect, collate, and munge piles of spreadsheets into something useful. The problem, of course, is traction--convincing content providers to adopt the standard. I was immediately reminded of all the efforts that went into the NISO Metasearch Initiative. Like NISO-MI, SUSHI adoption and COUNTER compliance are standards and protocols that librarians and vendors together should pressure publishers to adopt. If libraries did not have to expend so much effort to collect statistics, they might actually have some time to discern what they mean.

When it comes to metasearch, I am continually frustrated to see publisher after publisher do more and more to their portals, as if every scholar and library in the world came through their door to be wowed by the latest search feature. It's hard enough to get patrons to start with the library home page, and many libraries are trying to develop services and technologies that put out the virtual- library welcome mat in other places. It's all well and good to make publisher websites nicer landing places, but such effort without a means to push content out to users or to make the content available for federated search are futile (some are indeed doing both, and that is fine with me). Libraries should be leading the effort to break down the arrogant barriers between their patrons and the content they seek.

I realize I am getting a little outside my area of expertise, but it's frustrating when publishers already have us over a barrel for the content they provide--it's even more annoying to see wasted efforts at technical developments that don't necessarily help users.

Whether it's metasearch or developing standards like COUNTER and SUSHI, I applaud the publishers who give these efforts traction by trying them out; I encourage the rest to take a leap of faith, or their customers (libraries) to push harder.

After spending a couple years of my professional life trying to improve the state of metasearch (federated search, if you prefer), I took a little break from being so passionate about the subject. But, like e-books, it's one of those library technologies that I just can't seem to shake an interest in. And it seems like librarians are loosening up a bit and letting patron demands and satisfaction with "good enough" search results replace an entrenched skepticism about the adequacy of metasearch. It's still amusing to note that it took metasearch for librarians to beatify content providers' native interfaces, which before their advent were also often described as inadequate.

In the meantime, there have been a few more interesting developments in the metasearch space. Serials Solutions has announced that it is about to launch Results Clustering by Vivisimo for its Central Search product (there's an informational webinar on the new feature on Tuesday, Oct. 10). The automated classification tool organizes search results by author, title, subject, and journal title as the results are returned. Ex Libris has also signed an OEM agreement with Vivisimo for MetaLib. And (ironically or fittingly, I am not sure which), Frank Bilotto, formerly head of publishing at Vivisimo, has joined MuseGlobal in the new position of vice-president, publishing and digital media.

The development comes at an interesting juncture, as faceted classification in online catalogs begins to take hold in libraries as well (faceted browsing and clustering are really two very different technologies--perhaps fodder for a future post or technical face-off).

The other day, I had the good fortune to stumble upon a federated search vendor that has been around since 1999. Deep Web Technologies only recently began exploring the library space, but might be familiar to librarians who have searched Science.gov. I had a great conversation about the past and future of metasearch with the company's founder, Abe Lederman. Though primarily in the government and open web space, the company has also recently worked with a Fortune 50 company to enhance its enterprise search capabilities. (Side question: Is "enterprise search" replacing "metasearch?")

It's obvious (as in my self-interest) that I am intrigued by looking a little outside the traditional library automation space for new ideas (cough...Endeca...cough). Obviously vendors like Ex Libris and Serials Solutions are doing the same thing through partnerships with a company like Vivisimo, so why shouldn't libraries themselves do the same?