Re: [CODE4LIB] internet archive experiment -- bad metadata
How common is the kind of meta data mismatch* associated with this record? http://openlibrary.org/books/OL23383343M/Cisco_Networking_Academy_Program What is the point of contact for making corrections? *The metadata is about Unix (2004), the Book is about Ben Franklin (1908) Contributed by Google -Original Message- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Eric Lease Morgan Sent: Friday, May 14, 2010 2:05 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: [CODE4LIB] internet archive experiment We are doing a tiny experiment here at Notre Dame with the Internet Archive, specifically, we are determining whether or not we can supplement a special collection with full text content. We are hosting at site colloquially called the Catholic Portal -- a collection of rare, infrequently held, and uncommon materials of a Catholic nature. [1] Much of the content of the Portal is metadata -- MARC and EAD records/files. I think the Portal would be more useful if it contained full text content. If it did, then indexing would be improved and services against the texts could be implemented. How can we get full text content? This is what we are going to try: 1. parse out identifying information from metadata (author names, titles, dates, etc.) 2. construct a URL in the form of a Advanced Search query and send it to the Archive 3. get back a list of matches in an XML format 4. parse the result looking for the best matches 5. save Internet Archive keys identifying full text items 6. mirror Internet Archive content locally using keys as pointers 7. update local metadata files pointing to Archive content as well as locally mirrored content 8. re-index local metadata If we are (somewhat) successful, then search results would not only have pointers to the physical items, but they would also have pointers to the digitized items. Not only could they have pointers to the digitized items, but they could also have pointers to services against the texts such as make word cloud, display concordance, plot word/phrase frequency, etc. These later services are spaces where I think there is great potential for librarianship. Frankly, because of the Portal's collection policy, I don't expect to find very much material. On the other hand, the same process could be applied to more generic library collections where more content may have already been digitized. Wish us luck. [1] Catholic Portal - http://www.catholicresearch.net/ [2] Advanced search - http://www.archive.org/advancedsearch.php -- Eric Lease Morgan University of Notre Dame
[CODE4LIB] Job Posting: Web Developer / Designer
Web Developer / Designer A.R. Dykes Library/Internet Development University of Kansas Medical Center, Kansas City, KS See the full posting at https://jobs.kumc.edu/applicants/jsp/shared/position/JobDetails_css.jsp?postingId=371066 Position Summary: This person will work closely with Dykes Library staff, faculty and other Information Resources units to raise the visibility of expertise, research, publications, grey literature, and collections on the KUMC web site. Requires one to work closely with librarians and library personnel to understand information requirement needs and to then seek solutions for meeting those required needs. Requires working with diverse web applications and data sources to provide seamless user services. Required Qualifications: 2 or more years experience developing database-driven web applications Degree from accredited college or university. An equivalent combination of education and experience may be considered - each year of additional experience may be substituted for one year of education. Experience programming with Ruby Experience working with XSLT and XPath Experience developing real-world applications using Ruby on Rails, Java, .NET, or PHP and Postgresql, MySQL, SQL Server, or Oracle Experience working in a Unix environment Willingness to work in a collaborative team setting Excellent communication skills, analytical, and problem-solving abilities
Re: [CODE4LIB] Multi-server Search Engine response times: was - OASIS SRU and CQL, access to most-current drafts
Wait, but in the case you suspect is common, where you return results as soon as the first resource is returned, and subsequent results are added to the _end_ of the list I'm thinking that in most of these cases, the subsequent results will be several pages in, and the user will never even get there. And if the majority of users are only looking at results from one resource... why do a broadcast multi-server search in the first place? Peter Noerr wrote: However things are a bit different now... At the risk of opening the debate once more and lots of lengthy discussion let me say that our experience (as one of the handful of commercial providers of multi-server search engines (MSSEs? - it'll never stick, but I like it)) is: 1) Times are not slow for most installations as they are set by default to provide incremental results in the fashion Jakub suggests (First In, First Displayed). So users see results driven by the time of the fastest Source, not the slowest. contentious statementThis means that, on average, getting the results from a MSSE can be faster than doing the same search on all of the native sites (just talking response times here, not the fact it is one search versus N). Do the maths - it's quite fun. /contentious statement 2) The average delay for just processing the results through modern MSSEs is about 0.5 sec. Add to this say another 0.2 for two extra network hops and the additional response time to first display is about 3/4 of a second. This is a time shift all the way down the set of results - most of which the user isn't aware of as they are beyond the first 10 on screen, and the system allows interaction with those 10 while the rest are getting their act together. So, under 1 second is added to response times which average about 5 seconds. Of course, waiting for all the results adds this time to the slowest results. 3) Most users seem happy to get things back faster and not worry too much about relevance ranking. To combat the response time issue for users who require ranked results, the incremental return can be set to show interfiled results as the later records come in and rank within the ones displayed to the user. This can be disconcerting, but making sure the UI doesn't lose track of the user's focus is helpful. Another option is to show that new results are available, and let the user manually click to get them incorporated - less intrusive, but an extra click! General experience with the incremental displays shows that users are happiest with them when there is an obvious and clear reason for the new additions. The most accepted case is where the ranking criterion is price, and the user is always happy to see a cheaper item arrive. It really doesn't work well for titles sorted alphabetically - unless the user is looking for a specific title which should occur at the beginning of the list. And these examples illustrate the general point - that if the user is focused on specific items at the top of the list, then they are generally happy with an updating list, if they are more in browse mode, then the distraction of the updating list is just that - a distraction, if it is on screen. Overall our experience from our partner's users is that they would rather see things quickly than wait for relevance ranking. I suspect partly (can of worms coming) because the existing ranking schemes don't make a lot of difference (ducks quickly). Peter Peter Noerr CTO, Museglobal www.museglobal.com -Original Message- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Walker, David Sent: Tuesday, May 18, 2010 12:44 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] OASIS SRU and CQL, access to most-current drafts in order to provide decent user experience you need to be able to present some results sooner than others. I would actually question whether this is really necessary. A few years back, I did a big literature review on metasearch, as well as a looked at a good number of usability studies that libraries did with metasearch systems. One thing that stood to me out was that the literature (written by librarians and technologists) was very concerned about the slow search times of metasearch, often seeing it as a deal-breaker. And yet, in the usability studies, actual students and faculty were far less concerned about the search times -- within reason, of course. I thought the UC Santa Cruz study [1] summarized the point well: Users are willing to wait as long as they think that they will get useful results. Their perceptions of time depend on this belief. Trying to return the results of a metasearch quickly just for the sake of returning them quickly I think introduces other problems (in terms of relevance ranking and presentation) that do far more to negatively impact the user experience. Just my opinion, of course. --Dave [1]
Re: [CODE4LIB] OASIS SRU and CQL, access to most-current drafts
Since we generally return results asynchronously to client systems from our MSSE (fed/meta/broadcast/aggregated/parallel/Multi-Server/Search Engine) I would just point out that we use other protocols than SRU when doing so. When we do use SRU on the client side, then we send back the results in a complete set. Otherwise we send them in tranches on a timescale controlled by the client system, usually about every 2 seconds. Obviously an SRU-async protocol is possible, but would it be used? As a MSSE we would use it to get results from Sources, so they could be processed earlier (smaller response time) and more smoothly. But that would require Source servers implemented it, and what would their incentive be to implement it? For direct use with end users it would mean a browser client capable of retrieving and managing the partial data is needed. Middleware systems (between the MSSE and the user) would need to support it, and pass the benefit to the user. Any system doing heavy analysis of the results would probably not want (and may not be able) to start than analysis until all the results are obtained, because of the added messiness of handling partial results sets, from multiple Sources (it is messy - believe me). I would be very happy to see such a protocol (and have it implemented), and if Jakub implemented browser code to handle that end, then the users could benefit. Peter Peter Noerr CTO. MuseGlobal www.museglobal.com -Original Message- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Jakub Skoczen Sent: Tuesday, May 18, 2010 12:51 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] OASIS SRU and CQL, access to most-current drafts On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 9:17 PM, Ray Denenberg, Library of Congress r...@loc.gov wrote: First, no. There are extensibility features in SRU but nothing that would help here. Actually, Jonathan, what I though you were suggesting was the creation of a (I hesitate to say it) metasearch engine. I use that term because it is what NISO called it, when they started their metasearch initiative five or so years ago, to create a standard for a metasearch engine, but they got distracted and the effort really came to nothing. I'm not sure if Jonathan was suggesting that but that's exactly what I had in mind - using SRU 2.0 as a front-end protocol for a meta-search engine. And yes while creating a third-party, SRU-inspired protocol for that purpose could work, I see very little value in such exercise. I suspect that, as any standard, SRU has certain limitations and, as an implementer, you have to work around them but you do end up with an obvious gain: standards compliance. SRU-inspired protocol is not quite the same thing, and it's probably easier to go all the way and create a custom, proprietary protocol. The premise of the metasearch engine is that there exists a single- thread protocol, for example, SRU, and the need is to manage many threads, which is what the metasearch engine would have done if it had ever been defined. This is probably not an area for OASIS work, but if someone wanted to revive the effort in NISO (and put it on the right track) it could be useful. --Ray -Original Message- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Jonathan Rochkind Sent: Tuesday, May 18, 2010 2:56 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] OASIS SRU and CQL, access to most-current drafts Jakub Skoczen wrote: I wonder if someone, like Kuba, could design an 'extended async SRU' on top of SRU, that is very SRU like, but builds on top of it to add just enough operations for Kuba's use case area. I think that's the right way to approach it. Is there a particular extensibility feature in the protocol that allows for this? I don't know, but that's not what I was suggesting. I was suggesting you read the SRU spec, and then design your own SRU-async spec, which is defined as exactly like SRU 2.0, except it also has the following operations, and is identified in an Explain document like X. Jonathan -- Cheers, Jakub
Re: [CODE4LIB] Multi-server Search Engine response times: was - OASIS SRU and CQL, access to most-current drafts
Aha, but we get interleaved results from the different Sources. So the results are not all A, all B, all... Even if the results come as complete sets of 10, we internally collect them asynchronously as they are processed. The number of buffers and processing stages is quite large, so the parallel processing nature of multi-tasking means that the results get interleaved. It is still possible that one set of results comes in so far in advance of everything else that it is completely processed before anything else arrives, then the display is all A, others. However the major benefit is that the results from all the Sources are there at once, so even if the user uses the system to skip from Source to Source, it is quicker than running the search on all the Sources individually. And, yes, you can individually save a few here, one or two there to make your combined chosen few. But, first page only viewing does mean that the fastest Sources get the best spots. Is this an incentive to speed up the search systems? (Actually it has happened that a couple of the Sources who we showed comparative response time to, did use the figures to get funds for hardware replacement.) Peter -Original Message- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Jonathan Rochkind Sent: Wednesday, May 19, 2010 12:45 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Multi-server Search Engine response times: was - OASIS SRU and CQL, access to most-current drafts Wait, but in the case you suspect is common, where you return results as soon as the first resource is returned, and subsequent results are added to the _end_ of the list I'm thinking that in most of these cases, the subsequent results will be several pages in, and the user will never even get there. And if the majority of users are only looking at results from one resource... why do a broadcast multi-server search in the first place? Peter Noerr wrote: However things are a bit different now... At the risk of opening the debate once more and lots of lengthy discussion let me say that our experience (as one of the handful of commercial providers of multi- server search engines (MSSEs? - it'll never stick, but I like it)) is: 1) Times are not slow for most installations as they are set by default to provide incremental results in the fashion Jakub suggests (First In, First Displayed). So users see results driven by the time of the fastest Source, not the slowest. contentious statementThis means that, on average, getting the results from a MSSE can be faster than doing the same search on all of the native sites (just talking response times here, not the fact it is one search versus N). Do the maths - it's quite fun. /contentious statement 2) The average delay for just processing the results through modern MSSEs is about 0.5 sec. Add to this say another 0.2 for two extra network hops and the additional response time to first display is about 3/4 of a second. This is a time shift all the way down the set of results - most of which the user isn't aware of as they are beyond the first 10 on screen, and the system allows interaction with those 10 while the rest are getting their act together. So, under 1 second is added to response times which average about 5 seconds. Of course, waiting for all the results adds this time to the slowest results. 3) Most users seem happy to get things back faster and not worry too much about relevance ranking. To combat the response time issue for users who require ranked results, the incremental return can be set to show interfiled results as the later records come in and rank within the ones displayed to the user. This can be disconcerting, but making sure the UI doesn't lose track of the user's focus is helpful. Another option is to show that new results are available, and let the user manually click to get them incorporated - less intrusive, but an extra click! General experience with the incremental displays shows that users are happiest with them when there is an obvious and clear reason for the new additions. The most accepted case is where the ranking criterion is price, and the user is always happy to see a cheaper item arrive. It really doesn't work well for titles sorted alphabetically - unless the user is looking for a specific title which should occur at the beginning of the list. And these examples illustrate the general point - that if the user is focused on specific items at the top of the list, then they are generally happy with an updating list, if they are more in browse mode, then the distraction of the updating list is just that - a distraction, if it is on screen. Overall our experience from our partner's users is that they would rather see things quickly than wait for relevance ranking. I suspect partly (can of worms coming) because the existing ranking schemes don't make a lot of
Re: [CODE4LIB] Multi-server Search Engine response times: was - OASIS SRU and CQL, access to most-current drafts
Agreed it is a problem. What MSSEs do (when operating this way) is make this issue a response time dependent one. Users themselves make it a Source dependent one (they only look at results from the sites they decide to search). Ranking algorithms make it an algorithm dependent one (their algorithm will determine what is top of the list). In all cases the results are vying for the few slots that the user will actually look at - above the fold, first 3, first page, etc. The problem is that all results cannot be first, and we do not have any way to insist the user look at all of them and make an informed selection. Anyway this can go all the way back to the collection policies of the library and the aggregators and even the cussedness of authors in not writing articles on exactly the right topic. (bad authors!) The MSEEs try to be even handed about it, but it doesn't always work. Possibly saving technologies here are text analysis and faceting. These can help take horizontal slices out of the vertically ordered list of results. That means the users can select another list which will be ordered a bit differently, and with text analysis and facets applied again, give them ways to slice and dice those results. But, in the end it requires enough interest from the user to do some refinement, and that battles with good enough. Peter -Original Message- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Walker, David Sent: Wednesday, May 19, 2010 1:18 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Multi-server Search Engine response times: was - OASIS SRU and CQL, access to most-current drafts And if the majority of users are only looking at results from one resource... why do a broadcast multi-server search in the first place? More than just a theoretical concern. Consider this from an article by Nina McHale: [R]eference and instruction staff at Auraria were asked to draw up a list of ten or so resources that would be included in a general-focus “Quick Search” . . . [h]owever, in practice, the result was disappointing. The results returned from the fastest resource were the results on top of the pile, and of the twelve resources chosen, PsycINFO routinely returned results first. Reference and instruction staff rightly felt that this skewed the results for a general query. [1] One library' perspective, and I'm pretty sure they were not using Muse. But conceptually the concern would be the same. --Dave [1] http://webserviceslibrarian.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-reference-and- instruction.html == David Walker Library Web Services Manager California State University http://xerxes.calstate.edu From: Code for Libraries [code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Jonathan Rochkind [rochk...@jhu.edu] Sent: Wednesday, May 19, 2010 12:45 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Multi-server Search Engine response times: was - OASIS SRU and CQL, access to most-current drafts Wait, but in the case you suspect is common, where you return results as soon as the first resource is returned, and subsequent results are added to the _end_ of the list I'm thinking that in most of these cases, the subsequent results will be several pages in, and the user will never even get there. And if the majority of users are only looking at results from one resource... why do a broadcast multi-server search in the first place? Peter Noerr wrote: However things are a bit different now... At the risk of opening the debate once more and lots of lengthy discussion let me say that our experience (as one of the handful of commercial providers of multi- server search engines (MSSEs? - it'll never stick, but I like it)) is: 1) Times are not slow for most installations as they are set by default to provide incremental results in the fashion Jakub suggests (First In, First Displayed). So users see results driven by the time of the fastest Source, not the slowest. contentious statementThis means that, on average, getting the results from a MSSE can be faster than doing the same search on all of the native sites (just talking response times here, not the fact it is one search versus N). Do the maths - it's quite fun. /contentious statement 2) The average delay for just processing the results through modern MSSEs is about 0.5 sec. Add to this say another 0.2 for two extra network hops and the additional response time to first display is about 3/4 of a second. This is a time shift all the way down the set of results - most of which the user isn't aware of as they are beyond the first 10 on screen, and the system allows interaction with those 10 while the rest are getting their act together. So, under 1 second is added to response times which average about 5 seconds. Of course, waiting for all the results adds this time to the slowest
