Transcript Seeding search engines with data from the Australian National Bibliographic Database Tony Boston Assistant Director-General Resource Sharing National Library of Australia 18 September 2006

Seeding search engines with data
from the Australian National
Bibliographic Database
Tony Boston
Assistant Director-General
Resource Sharing
National Library of Australia
18 September 2006
Outline
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Why seed search engines?
National Library Digital Collections
Libraries Australia and the ANBD
Results to date
Future directions
Why seed search engines?
To provide new discovery pathways for
users of Australian libraries and increase
exposure of the Libraries Australia Search
service on the Internet
Why people use search engines
• Self-service, satisfaction, seamlessness1
• 89% of US college students start research
process via Search Engines1
• Principle of Least Effort2
• Poor design of library systems, eg:
complexity, lack of relevance ranking3
12003
OCLC environmental scan: Pattern recognition. C. De Rosa, L.
Dempsey and A. Wilson January 2004
2Improving user access to library catalog and portal information: final
report. M. J. Bates 2003
3Rethinking How We provide Bibliographic Services for the University of
California. Final report: December 2005 Bibliographic Services Task
Force
National Library Digital Collections
• ~ 100,000 items from the Library’s
collection digitised since 1996.
• Pictures, maps, sheet music,
manuscripts, some books and serials
More pathways, more users
• Three major pathways to collection items:
– Via the Library’s catalogue
– Via federated discovery services, eg: Libraries
Australia, MusicAustralia, PictureAustralia
– Via Internet search engines
• URL lists for search engines to harvest
• Persistent URLs resolve to a page to be
indexed, eg:
– http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an22948286
Search engine indexing and access paths
Libraries Australia and the ANBD
• Free Libraries Australia Search service
– Launched by Senator Helen Coonan on 27 February
2006
– Freely available to anyone with Internet access
– Easy to use, ‘google like’ search
• Records exported to Search Engines
– March 2006: 700,000 records matched to Google Scholar
• Simple XML format
– July 2006: 1.4 M records matched to Google Scholar
• MARCXML format
– August 2006: Records added to Google Book Search
– End 2006: Records in main google.com and yahoo.com
index
Google’s Union Catalogue Program
• Data obtained from 12 union catalogues:
– Australia, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ireland,
Israel, Hungary, Lithuania, Netherlands, Taiwan,
United Kingdom and United States (WorldCat),
• Links to union catalogues vary based on IP
address of user
• Issues:
– Unique material
– Matching algorithm
– Trust, profit and motivation…
Libraries and the long tail
• 80% of people want just 20% of any
collection
• 80% of the collection requested rarely
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The long tail of sporadic usage
Represents a new business model => NetFlix
Fewer, larger resources => Union Catalogues
Better fulfilment: home delivery, universal
‘Get it’ button
– Project library services into Web 2.0 world
Future directions
• Enhancements to Libraries Australia
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Relevance Ranking
Clustering and faceted browsing
Annotation and links to value added services
Improved getting
• Exposure of the ANBD in google.com,
yahoo.com
• Libraries Australia search box
• Relationship with OCLC and Open WorldCat
Libraries Australia search box
Conclusions
• Seeding search engines generates:
– More discovery pathways => more users
• Union catalogues support:
– The business of libraries
– Comprehensiveness => Exposing the long tail
– More specialised services beyond search
engines
– Improved getting of items