Hi Don, Starting as recently as Evergreen 2.6 (it's noted on the Evergreen 2.6 release notes under "structured data" - http://evergreen-ils.org/documentation/release/RELEASE_NOTES_2_6.html), efforts were made by developers like Dan Scott to add structured data elements to Evergreen's catalog to make them more discoverable. This work has continued throughout newer Evergreen releases and I'd like to say that through Dan's work and others, it has been essential towards keeping Evergreen's catalog more friendly to search engines, like Google, etc.
Evergreen 2.8's release notes include lots more discoverability enhancements added with that release too: http://evergreen-ils.org/documentation/release/RELEASE_NOTES_2_8.html#_opac Since your site does not include a manually configured robots.txt file, I'll point you at an example set at Dan's library Laurentian University's catalog: https://laurentian.concat.ca/robots.txt (we based many of our changes following the example they set). That robots.txt file tends to guide search engine bots that arrive at the catalog towards indexing the appropriate contents, and avoid/skip over certain undesirables. By default, if you do not have anything set, then search engine bots will likely attempt to index everything in your catalog that it can publicly access. Doing an example search like https://www.google.com/#q=asbury+catalog+Star+Trek (aka, keywords in Google for "asbury catalog Star Trek" I can already see a couple results that come from your Evergreen catalog records. So at least Google's search engine bots are already working to grab your catalog's contents. That all said, I suppose one potential "danger" of having bots freely scan over your site is that if they get too busy with indexing your site's contents, they can overwhelm and cause interruptions in your ability to use Evergreen. This happened to us at least once before, where some indexer in China scanned our whole catalog and tried to index every page causing us to run out of system resources trying to serve up all the content it was requesting. For myself and Bibliomation's catalog, I've been experimenting with modifying our robots.txt file and continually upgrading our Evergreen catalog to reflect the latest enhancements for structured data to try making the most use out of what's possible in Evergreen. Proceeding forward, I've also done some small experiments in creating Google Custom Search Engines to search against our indexed online catalog (and requesting scheduled indexing from Google's bots) as an alternative means of discovering the content contained in our systems. Moving forward, I expect this to continue to be an exciting area to explore the ways of improving discoverability of Evergreen's content. -- Ben On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 8:15 AM, Donald Butterworth <don.butterwo...@asburyseminary.edu> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I was asked to toss these questions out and get some perspectives. > > "What would it take to make the Evergreen catalog holdings available to > generic search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo?" "Even if it > is doable, is it a good idea?" > > The motivation behind these questions is a perception that the first attempt > many students make to do research is through a general web search. > > Anybody have a comment? > > Don > > -- > Don Butterworth > Faculty Associate / Librarian III > B.L. Fisher Library > Asbury Theological Seminary > don.butterwo...@asburyseminary.edu > (859) 858-2227 -- Benjamin Shum Evergreen Systems Manager Bibliomation, Inc. 24 Wooster Ave. Waterbury, CT 06708 203-577-4070, ext. 113