A c t i o n f o r L i b r a r i e s — O c t o b e r 2 0 0 5

Library Web Portals Expanding
Impact of Library Collections

By Heather Clark
"Amazoogle effect?" Such a phrase would have been gibberish to even the most tech savvy librarian a mere six years ago. Yet the impact of Amazon and Google has now moved beyond the Silicon Valley and the NASDAQ to the library world. As you interact with your library patrons, you have undoubtedly realized the way these "one-stop-shop" online entities have affected the needs and expectations of the typical library user.

Patrons are looking for straightforward searching and rapid responses — Amazoogle. Unfortunately, the typical library's electronic resources consist of multiple database interfaces with multiple ways to access and search the same information. Recent studies and blog postings are encouraging libraries to change the way they present resources and more importantly, how they enable patrons to search them. Metasearching is one aspect of this growing field of study and conversation.

What is metasearching? Many librarians are familiar with this concept in the context of Internet search engines. Web sites like Metacrawler and Dogpile initiate a search query on several search engines at one time, collecting and presenting results in one display. These technologies have been around for some time.

If we apply this same concept to the digital library environment, we can create one point of search to simplify user access to the multiple and disparate sources of content available within a single library Web site. In some ways, metasearching does for the world of reference databases what the reference database did for the world of indexes. The reference database allows the searcher to look through every volume of the index at one time, rather than paging through each volume individually.

One might think, "Google did it; can it be so hard?" The problem for the library environment in creation of a simple, yet cohesive searching environment is the fact that the common search engine must search multiple targets the plethora of databases, institutional repositories, online catalogs and typical Web content unlike Google, which is searching a single copy of the Web rather than the Web itself.

Metasearch software, also known as Web portal products, is in development widely. A list is available from the Library of Congress (www.loc.gov/catdir/lcpaig/portalproducts.html). These metasearching products are able to aggregate a variety of sources, such as catalogs, reference databases (citation and full- text) and digital repositories of e-books. Some libraries set up their metasearching products to search only full-text databases; others have theirs searching a variety of sources.

What does this mean for library staff involved in resource sharing? How will the introduction of meta- searching portals in the library environment affect your interlibrary loan service? One consequence may be the decrease of those requests for items that you already own — whether digital or print. When patrons can access the variety of content housed in your institution from one point, they may be less likely to overlook parts of your holdings. In this way your workload might be lessened.

However, increased database usage could also generate increased ILL usage. More content of the Web will be available more readily, revealing the hidden things that may have previously been overlooked because the patron did not want to search through several databases to retrieve a small variant of content.

No matter how metasearch portals impact the resource sharing landscape, they offer the promise of opening up library resources to deeper, more effective exploration, expanding the impact and influence of library collections.

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Library Web Portals Expanding Impact of Library Collections

Library Web Portals Expanding
Impact of Library Collections