We’re in the business of making access to information easier for people and, most of all, for SOFTWARE that in turn makes that information available to people. A lot of our software is based around a kind of switchboard or functional ‘hub’ model which means that when we extend a capability in ONE area, new […]
If you are a Java shop looking to build web sites on top of Pazpar2 or our MasterKey platform, then MasterKey JSF (mkjsf) could be just the tool to kick-start your project. You know your J2EE and Ajax, and you might be considering JavaServer Faces for your UI development. Or maybe you have already developed […]
It’s always fun to see someone do something really neat with your software. This elegantly designed search interface for Asia studies makes excellent use of Pazpar2. I particularly like the clever use of a bar chart for the date facet. Nice work!
Most of the science of Information Retrieval centers around being able to find and rank the right set of documents in response to a given query. We spend much time arguing about technical details like ranking algorithms and the benefits of indexing versus broadcast searching. Every Information Professional I know both deifies and fears Google […]
We are often asked about where we stand on the discussion of central indexing versus broadcast metasearching. Our standard answer: “You probably need some of both” always calls for further explanation. Some time ago, I wrote this up for a potential business partner. If it sounds a little like a marketing spiel… guilty as charged. […]
spent most of last week up in Edinburgh, for the Open Edge conference on open-source software in libraries, attended mostly by academic librarians and their technical people. It was an interesting time, and I met a lot of interesting people. At the risk of overusing the word “interesting”, it was also of interest to see how widespread […]
We’ve been investigating ways we might add result clustering to our metasearch tools. Here’s a short introduction to the topic and to an open source platform for experimenting in this area. Clustering Using a search interface that just takes some keywords often leads to miscommunication. The computer has no sense of context and users may not […]
We have always held that the schism between broadcast metasearching and local indexing is rather goofy – that in practice, you do whatever it takes to get the results in front of your user when and where he needs it, and the best solutions will allow for whatever approach is needed in the moment. Inspired […]
Our metasearch middleware, Pazpar2, spends a lot of time doing XML transformations. When we use Pazpar2 with traditional library data sources that return MARC21, we internally convert the received records into MARCXML (if they’re not already represented as such) and then transform into the internal pazpar2 XML format using XSLT (more on this process here). MARCXML is nice to look at, but it’s not an optimal format […]
Inspired by Jakub’s posting yesterday, I wondered how easy it would be to build an HTTP-to-Z39.50 gateway similar to his in Ruby, my language of the moment. Different languages offer different tools and different ways of doing things, and it’s always instructive to compare. Ruby libraries are generally distributed in the form of “gems”: packages analogous to […]